# Sparkle OCRE Project Podcast - Episode 2 **Title:** OCRE Framework Benefits and Values for the R&E Community **Speaker:** - David Heyns, GÉANT, OCRE Project Director - Paolo Perulli, Sparkle, Project Team Member - Host/Interviewer **Duration:** Approximately 20 minuti --- ## Transcript **Host:** Dear friends, welcome to the second episode of our podcast series focused on OCRE framework and its benefits and values for the R&E community all over Europe and beyond. This is a very special occasion because we're glad and honored to have here David Heyns, part of GÉANT, an OCRE project director. Thank you David for being here with us today. We also have Paolo Perulli, part of Sparkle, a member of the project team devoted to the implementation of the framework. Thank you Paolo. Hi David, can you tell us something more about GÉANT, its mission and its main achievements so far? **David Heyns:** Yes, so at GÉANT we have a very interesting role in the global education and research community. We are the Pan-European Research and Education Network, or REN, and we interconnect our 39 national REN partners to each other and their global international counterparts on all continents. Through our integrated catalog of connectivity, collaboration and identity services, we provide users with highly reliable, unconstrained access to computing, analysis, storage, applications and other resources to ensure that Europe remains at the forefront of academia and research. We connect over 50 million users at 10,000 institutes across Europe and we support all science disciplines. Our backbone network operates at speeds of up to 500 gigabits per second and reaches over 100 national networks worldwide. **Host:** Paolo, now it's your turn to briefly introduce us Sparkle and its business capabilities. **Paolo Perulli:** Thank you, well let me just start saying that in a couple of weeks Sparkle will turn 100 years old. It was in fact the 9th of August 1921 when a company called Italcable was founded. Its mission at the time was to start implementing global telecommunication connectivity, starting from two submarine cables linking Italy to Argentina and U.S. where large communities of Italians were living at the time. Just think that 20 years before Guglielmo Marconi was making the first ever trans-oceanic radio communication so you can imagine how visionary that project was at that time. Well after 100 years Sparkle represents the evolution of that dream to put the whole world in touch through submarine cables and not only. Today Sparkle is part of TIM the former Telecom Italia and is its international arm managing one of the largest voice and data network in the world. We have subsidiaries and offices in 33 countries with an account of approximately 800 in Italy and abroad. But this centenarian dream is still alive and keeps evolving so this is why Sparkle today has became a global ICT provider able to integrate and complement its unique assets and capabilities with new business models like IOT, multi-channel communication tools, security solution and of course data centers and cloud solutions which in the end after this long journey brought us here proudly being a certified supplier for GÉANT initiatives. **Host:** Paolo can you tell us more about current Sparkle positioning within the cloud ecosystem? **Paolo Perulli:** Well following our mother company TIM which has been a pioneer among the telcos launching cloud services more than 10 years ago Sparkle has started its cloud journey in 2011 by developing a proprietary cloud service with a specific geographic focus in Greece and Turkey. At the time the Sparkle strategy was to scale in the value chain for the enterprise market by upgrading and enlarging in a way its service portfolio from the traditional core connectivity to a full digital ICT offering. We then later evolved to a multi-cloud approach and soon became integrated and broker for main public cloud providers in the market meeting so customers increasing requests for a wide range of possibilities. Today we are further developing and consolidating such a proposition being a global provider able to design, configure and manage multi-cloud solutions for our customers relying on top public cloud platforms widely supported by governance tool like automation platform, consumption monitor application, cloud orchestrators and so forth and perfectly integrated with Sparkle cloud connectivity services. **Host:** David how R&E community is adopting cloud solutions and how during this peculiar time can this play a role in sustaining digitalization? **David Heyns:** So the research and education community globally is no different really to any industry sector in that they are consuming commercial digital services and solutions in support of absolutely every activity across teaching and learning and research and we certainly saw this in the past year where schools across Europe in fact across the globe had to get their students working online. Infrastructure as a service has replaced the on-premise support of workloads but the bespoke platform and software solutions available on cloud marketplaces are driving improved agility across all of these activities and improved outcomes. We are living in a time of unprecedented innovation as a result of high performance networks, advanced security operations and consumable cloud services. **Host:** Now Paolo and David the OCRE framework aims at some of the objectives you've been mentioning before. Can you give us some details on how this happens in practice and what is the role that Sparkle plays? **David Heyns:** Sure the OCRE framework came about as a result of a initiative by the European Commission that initiated the project in order to make commercial digital services easily consumable by the European research community in order to accelerate outcomes through enhanced agility. In doing this the commission intends to develop the European digital economy focused on this industry sector and support the startups and SMEs that are responsible for driving the innovative support of research activities. A secondary task of the OCRE project is to drive the adoption of these services and encourage the research community to use commercial digital services and the project is to distribute approximately 9 million euro in adoption funding to research institutes in a series of open calls. The awarded institutes will commit to working with the European open science cloud of which the OCRE project is a part of in developing compelling case studies that clearly demonstrate the benefits of using these services because we believe that this these use cases are really what will drive the adoption of these these services. Sparkle succeeded in winning contracts as a single supplier and support mechanism for Google cloud services in most of the European countries and is working closely with GÉANT to provide the OCRE framework offering that includes access to Google cloud platform and Google workspace for education. Through the OCRE call-off procedure the research institutes are able to procure these services easily at a competitive cost and we are seeing great uptake on this offering. **Host:** So Paolo it's very clear that Google cloud service provision is a key component of Sparkle success with OCRE. Can you tell us more in detail about these capabilities? **Paolo Perulli:** Yes I have to say that Google indeed apart from representing one of the top three hyperscalers global has a very large and interesting portfolio as it starts from covering all the basic needs you might have like virtual machines, data storage, virtual networking and all that well it then expands to some very advanced tools like high performance computing, high throughput computing, managed Kubernetes, machine learning, artificial intelligence and security services. It has two very unique let me say or peculiar capabilities in my opinion that are strictly related to Google identity as a company and that are BigQuery, the fastest petabyte scale cloud data warehouse and data analytics product and TensorFlow the Google open source library for AI and machine learning applications developed by Google Brain team and that is really worldwide recognized and used. Also Google has a very specific target especially among the academic community as it was acquired in 2014 the company called Kaggle which is an online platform for data science competitions and collaboration which has a very large community of about five million data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts which can there connect, share ideas, develop and find the best models and solutions for the most complicated data science challenges. It is therefore a perfect platform for learning and is really used by students and also many research have been published starting from Kaggle community and I also have to add that the first image of a black hole that has impressed me a lot was really computed using Google cloud platform services. **Host:** David, can you explain to us how the OCRE procurement works and how research and education institutions can get the most out of this framework? **David Heyns:** So the OCRE framework is an innovative four-year procurement framework contract that represents a fully compliant public procurement mechanism for the supply of commercial cloud services and the R&E community can procure services from the selected providers on OCRE without the need to issue a new tender. They can simply engage with one of the cloud support units that operate across Europe and rely on GÉANT contract management processes who will support the call-off process with the chosen provider. All of the available services are detailed in a single service catalog available online that describes the available services on each platform from each supplier in each country. And I think it's important for the listeners to appreciate how important and innovative this framework is. The number of suppliers that joined the framework demonstrates the level of commitment to this community. We are working closely with the local research and education networks in each country as they have cloud support units and we are asking them to provide the relationship between the institute members and the suppliers on the framework in their country. The OCRE procurement team and GÉANT contract management group provide extensive enablement via this unit for the NRENs and this support comes in the guise of desktop tools, reporting, frequently asked questions, legal feedback and we distribute this information to the R&E community through the NRENs. **Host:** David, six months since the activation of the framework, can you tell us what is the state of the art in terms of its adoption? **David Heyns:** So it is too early to provide a meaningful adoption rate. Many of the suppliers on OCRE only got to sign their framework contracts at the end of Q1 2021 but the GÉANT contract management group is in the process of following up on the mandatory quarterly supplier reporting which allows us to follow these trends and set a baseline for for dashboarding these. The previous framework showed a hundred percent increase in year-on-year consumption particularly in the countries where there was consumption through the framework and we're certainly expecting that at least from 2020 to 2021 we will see a hundred percent increase on the reporting of the previous framework but I do anticipate that this is going to be a lot higher. The OCRE framework does have a lot of visibility across Europe for a number of reasons and you know as we discussed previously the timing of the OCRE framework is really important as the this community is consuming more and more and more of these services. **Host:** Paolo, being Sparkle part of this initiative since 2016, can you tell us more about how you've enjoyed the collaboration with GÉANT so far and same for you David how it has been working with Sparkle so far? **Paolo Perulli:** Well Sparkle has been working with GÉANT since the first framework was released in 2016 and I must say that if we are still here after five years and being let me say engaged for at least other four years well this must mean we've liked each other a lot. Jokes apart we really enjoyed working with GÉANT, we appreciate their continued support, their hard work since we guess it's not easy to steer such complex projects on a pan-european scale. On the other hand I must say that it has been and still is exciting to work supporting the research and education community which although not always recognized by everybody but is humankind's assurance for a better and better future. The education development and the sleepless work of thousands of researchers in the end this is what pushes our society ahead and we are extremely proud to be part of this thank also to GÉANT of course. **David Heyns:** And as Paolo says GÉANT has worked closely with Sparkle for the last five or six years since the beginning of the last framework and they're certainly very enthusiastic participants in these activities. This podcast is a really good example of the commitment that Sparkle make to this community and then certainly we at GÉANT appreciate the relationship. **Host:** David and Paolo time just flew by and we are getting to the end of this interesting conversation. Let me just ask both of you to tell us in a sentence taken from your different perspective why an R&E should rely on OCRE framework and why should choose Sparkle as their provider. **David Heyns:** So I have more than one sentence for you on this actually. In terms of my role I cannot endorse a specific platform provider but I do really appreciate the opportunity to participate in this discussion and the efforts made by suppliers to invest in OCRE. The framework provides so many benefits to an institute in terms of ease of consumption via the call-offs. They do not need to go out to tender for the specific services that are available through OCRE. All of the suppliers have made great concessions to the R&E community in terms of pricing, support, waiving of data charges and others. The platforms are currently being tested by the OCRE consortium part of CERN using standard research workloads and various different platforms are in fact being tested. So we are looking at CPUs, GPUs, storage. We are looking at machine learning platforms, AI, the use of standard research algorithms. The suppliers are registering in EduGAIN which is the GÉANT R&E Identity Interfederation and most of the supplier networks already pair with GÉANT and the NRENs. The suppliers have also agreed to support the community in terms of workshops, training and on the ground support. **Paolo Perulli:** Well, as I said before, we are one of the multiple providers representing one of the available technology. But I might say that I've been working on these projects for months now and I'm still amazed by the level of excellence provided by Google Cloud Platform portfolio, especially when it comes to revolutionary applications like machine learning or artificial intelligence, along of course with well-known and established cloud capabilities like high-performance computing, high-throughput computing etc. that have been also recently used to implement and support some of the most exciting researchers worldwide like, for example, the first picture of a black hole ever taken which was a couple of years ago and impressed me quite a lot really. So in a nutshell, at Sparkle we do offer what we believe is the most innovative portfolio of cloud solutions, applications and tools along with our best capabilities and an experience in terms of customer support, design and implementation skills. All seasoned with a pinch of Italian passion, empathy and creativity and what's even more with the best value for money possible and no procurement headache. **Host:** So at the end of this episode let me just thanks once again David and Paolo for their time and for giving us such an interesting and comprehensive view of this initiative which is key to sustain and accelerate the capabilities and potential of the research and education community. See you soon for a new episode. **David Heyns:** So yes and a big thank you to Paolo and the Sparkle team. I have really enjoyed my afternoon in Rome and I really appreciate the efforts made on behalf of the framework. **Paolo Perulli:** Thank you David. It has been a pleasure and an honor having you here today and I wish we could keep on collaborating like this and have you in another episode of our portfolio. Thank you. --- **End of Transcript - Episode 2**