Friday, August 13, 2010

The European Union provides funding for a mobile cloud computing initiative

Project Optimis will be the European Union’s weapon of choice in its bid to compete with the US in the mobile cloud market. €7m (£5.8m) in funding is going into the three-year Project Optimis programme from Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) – the largest funding and research programme in the world – so it’s looking positive.

A little known company, Flexiant, has been approached to ‘provide part of the infrastructure service’ for Project Optimis. One of the pre-requisites for the project was to make sure the infrastructure would enable the EU to compete with the US. Cloud services in the US are at present more advanced – a sticking point perhaps for the EU.

Various mobile operators and vendors are involved with the project – all wanting to see cloud-based mobile applications across the EU. Ericsson, Nokia and Orange are but a few, whilst other partners include Atos Origin, BT and SAP.

The FP7 has an Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) total of €1.2bn. Half of this is for technology – most significantly this includes next-generation network and service infrastructures. With this much backing European cloud computing is going to go sky high.

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