BT, IBM, Accenture win European Commission cloud contracts

The European Commission has revealed which cloud companies will provide its new cloud services, dishing out 34.6 million euros (£26.6m) in contracts, broken up into three “lots”.

BT won the majority of the contracts, with BT Limited Belgian Branch awarded Lot 1 for private cloud and Lot 2 for public cloud. IBM, Accenture, ATOS, and Cloud Team Alliance also won contracts in Lot 2.

Lot 3, where the Commission looked for platform-as-a-service providers, was awarded to Telecom Italia, Accenture, ATOS and IBM.

The European Commission will be spending just over 10 million euros on BT for its private cloud service over four years. Almost 14 million euros will be spread between BT, IBM, ATOS, Accenture and Cloud Team Alliance until 2020 for their public cloud services.

“The cloud will enable the Commission to follow the ceaseless pace of today’s technological race among infrastructure providers where costs of storage, bandwidth and computing power are decreasing day by day, while enabling at the same time innovative solutions for new challenges such as big data,” the Commission said.

The European Commission said that its private cloud will consist of compute and storage facilities hosted by BT, connected to EC data centres by a dedicated private network link. Lot 3, consisting of the EC’s public platform contracts, will be “more than just storage and compute facilities”, because the lot also includes operating systems and/or database services built upon cloud infrastructure, said the Commission

BT Global Services’ European president Corrado Sciolla said last month when BT announced its winnings: “This is a milestone in our journey to be the leading global cloud services integrator, and demonstrates how we minimise the complexity, risks and costs for our customers as they move to the cloud. I’d like to take this opportunity to, once again, thank the EU for putting its trust in BT.”