A lifeline for small businesses & European enterprise success stories

: Written by: Tyler O'Neal, Staff Editor; Category: CLIENTS; Published: April 14, 2015, 10:52 pm

Small businesses are the lifeblood of Europe's economic engine. While cloud computing isn’t a miracle technology that c! an save any company that uses it, there is clear evidence that it can considerably benefit companies – large and small - that use it wisely. This means not only adapting to changes in technology but also coping with other transformations, like streamlining procedures and reinvesting time and resources into product, sales, marketing, and other revenue-generating areas.

The Finnish Cloud Software Program is a good case in point. The programme has applied the agile development methods of the software industry in collaboration with companies and researchers, focusing on creating a new ecosystem that prioritizes the most profitable cloud services. Its achievements are clearly demonstrating the return on investment, around €60 million over a four year period. The businesses involved have been able to double or even triple growth and have made considerable cost savings over a short timeframe. “This Cloud Software Programme is an important success story and a role model for every country that wants to help their industry gain a competitive edge in an increasingly competitive global market,” said Ake Edlund from Sweden, an independent evaluator of the initiative.

Initiatives at the European level driving new business opportunities include the VENUS-C FP7 project. Co-funded by the European Commission and Microsoft, VENUS-C has driven forward a user-centric approach right from the design phase and clearly demonstrated the benefits of public cloud computing infrastructures in terms of cost-effectiveness, flexibility and scalability. “As a technology-focused university, we are now working to ensure our cloud-based solutions, whether for architects and civil engineers or SMEs offering bioinformatics services become sustainable thanks to new business models. Our ultimate goal is to ensure public funding and industry support have a real benefit by taking research results to market,” said Professor Ignacio Blanquer, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.

Flexiant is one business supporting several universities including Edinburgh Napier University, Imperial College London, Politecnico Di Milano and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid to encourage integration of innovation and standardisation. By providing a forthcoming academic license of the enterprise grade cloud orchestration platform, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator, the Company is fostering these cloud computing success stories. Ger Burns, SVP of Service Delivery, Flexiant said, “Having worked with universities using open source platforms, Flexiant is familiar with the challenges this can cause in getting products to market. In our role within FP7 projects, we have demonstrated strong commitment to ensuring the work in cloud computing is launched and adopted in the public marketplace to further support enterprise innovation. As Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator has not been developed in isolation, but rather has evolved, carved and crafted from real-life customer use! cases, Flexiant has the proven technology to help bring tomorrow’s innovation to the marketplace. Working with Flexiant’s enterprise-grade platform, academia will be more aligned with the requirements of industry.”

The European Cloud Computing Strategy aims to ensure we have the right policy framework in place in order to unleash the full potential of the cloud, boosting economic growth and creating new jobs. Standards-based interoperable services are key to ensuring a level playing field and creating new opportunities for business agility and speed. Industry has an important role to play in driving these developments. “Cloudscape V tackles many of the same portability and interoperability aspects that the Cloud4SOA project has been taking on. At Atos we’re seeing that the cloud market is fortunately becoming more and more diverse, and the rise of new platforms creates a demand for portability solutions to ensure that initial investments and deployments have the flexibility that the private and public sector have come to expect,” explained Francesco D’Andria, Atos, Cloud4SOA Project Coordinator.

CLIENTS

A lifeline for small businesses & European enterprise success stories