# Sparkle OCRE Project Podcast - Episode 3 **Title:** TNC 25 - Sparkle's Multi-Cloud Solutions for Research and Education **Speaker:** - Karl (Interviewer) - Paola Crobu, Product Development Team, Sparkle - Paolo Perulli, Sales and Business Development Team, Sparkle **Duration:** Approximately 12 minuti --- ## Transcript **Karl:** Good morning everybody in this TNC 25 podcast I am speaking with Sparkle who are a major partner at TNC and have been a major partner for many years and I am speaking to Paola Crobu who is part of the product development team within Sparkle and Paolo Perulli who is part of their sales and business development team and they will be talking with me today about what Sparkle are going to be doing and showing and talking about at TNC. So Paola who are Sparkle and what does Sparkle do? **Paola Crobu:** Hi Karl thank you and good day to everybody. Sparkle is a global service provider offering it to operator and to enterprise customers including the public sector and the research and education institutions a larger portfolio of services from the more traditional connectivity and infrastructural one-like capacity vehicle location to the most advanced digital solutions like SD-WAN, SASE, quantum security and multi-cloud. We are a company headquartered in Italy but Sparkle has a commercial presence in more than 30 countries and operate a proprietary network of over 600,000 kilometers of fiber terrestrial and submarine mainly focused in three regional areas Europe, the Mediterranean Basin and in the Americas. In addition Sparkle has an extensive ownership in major international submarine cables but at the TNC 25 we will showcase how Sparkle is empowering the research and education community enabling its institutions to accelerate their digital transformation through trusted globally integrated cloud solutions. **Karl:** Thank you and obviously you're talking there about the cloud solutions and the multi-cloud solutions. So Paolo is this is the main thrust of your presentations at TNC, is that correct? **Paolo Perulli:** Yes it is. Thank you Karl and welcome everybody also from my side. So yes Sparkle will be present at TNC and this is not a new thing for us because we've been present since 2016 as we've been awarded as a certified provider for public cloud services in the research and education community since the really first edition of the framework in 2016. So basically after that we've been awarded also in 2020 and this year again 2024 we had an exceptional result in being awarded as first rank provider for AWS all over Europe and also getting awarded number one for Google and number two for Azure also elsewhere. So what are we bringing here is first of all our great experience and commitment towards research and education community that we've been showing during all these years working side by side with GÉANT to empower the research and education community with the use of a public cloud accelerating their activity and results. So in our speech we will be talking about how Sparkle has been supporting the healthcare sector and but this is just one of the sectors we will be able to support and not always not just under the public cloud side because as Paola has mentioned we are a global provider providing connectivity and capacity all over the world. So the fact that we are one of the first four global international providers allow us to complement our capabilities on the multi-cloud side with our core capabilities also on the network side. **Karl:** Absolutely and you mentioned OCRE 24 there. How do you as Sparkle see the main benefits from OCRE 24? **Paolo Perulli:** Well we've been working very hard in order to build a new proposition, a new offer to address research and education all over with OCRE 24 and the result I might say is something which is really interesting much improved from the latest version of the framework. So we of course still have the facilitated procurement so which means that the OCRE framework is a procurement tool that can be used fully compliant with the public procurement law all over and so it just gives the institution the ability to procure easily and fast. Then of course discounts. This is one of the most important points for everybody. Discounts are still there and have been significantly increased. There are different discounts for AWS or Google Cloud platform. Discounts have been increased and these are discounts that any institution hardly gets just by itself with these consumptions. Then full data egress. This is something which is really important and we are also witnessing our customers appreciating this very much but basically this means that Sparkle is not charging for the traffic which is routed outside the cloud data center to their premises. Normally this is charged but Sparkle thanks also to its identity of being a global cloud provider and connectivity provider is also able to reduce this cost and also reduce remove one of the barriers in cloud adoption. So the fear of having hidden costs given by the data egress. Then a full adoption support so we are able to bring the customer hand by hand in starting the cloud journey and supporting their adoption and their onboarding. Also thanks to our capabilities which I believe Paola wants to complement on talking about our multi-cloud competence center. Please Paola. **Paola Crobu:** Yes thank you Paolo. Indeed alongside the full onboarding activity that you have just mentioned Sparkle can offer also support services powered by our dedicated multi-cloud competence center. This team is composed by people skilled and certified in multiple cloud technologies AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure in measure to provide assistance on technical aspects like the cloud foundation or the IAM or the migration to the cloud as well as on the economic side. Indeed the multi-cloud competence center can provide also a FinOps advisory activity related to the consumptions and the economic impact for customers originated by their architectural and configuration settings into the cloud and therefore suggest improvement in this perspective and to achieve this goal the team leveraged on specific tools that we make also available to customers for their internal and autonomous consumptions monitoring. **Karl:** Fantastic thank you so much Paola and Paolo there and you've also got sessions you're presenting at the exchange theater is that correct? **Paola Crobu:** You're right Karl our presentation at the TNC 25 first will underscore the crucial role of the research and education in driving human progress across multiple dimensions social technological and economic and how frameworks like OCRE along with its selected service providers contribute significantly to this mission thanks to the strength point described by Paolo as it simply defines the cloudification process for research and education institutions. We have identified one of the sectors inside the research and education most impacted by the adoption of cloud technologies and specifically by the adoption of AI into the cloud the healthcare where we are witnessing an unprecedented transformation. AI technologies are indeed redefining every aspect of healthcare from early diagnosis to the personalization of therapies from patient monitoring to the efficient management of hospital facilities till the advanced medical education where AI is opening the door to immersive experience in dedicated metaversal environment allowing a student and professional to practice in virtual clinical scenarios with unparalleled levels of realism and anatomical accuracy and this is where cloud computing comes in providing the processing power the flexibility and the reliability needed to support the most advanced AI systems and Paolo can describe some significant project in this perspective. **Paolo Perulli:** Yes thanks Paola as you were saying this is a sector where we are seeing much interest and also opportunities and potential and it's also a sector where you know it's it's it's weird to say that but when you when you do a job it's also because of your want to to get a kind of rewarding from yourself so just realize that you are doing something for good and and working and helping these researchers in developing new ways in which they can detect tumor earlier for example on through which they can analyze the the genomic data of children with cancer may help really the progress so really really excited really let me say rewarded also as as as persons to to be able and in supporting this kind of initiatives in in the health care sector all over Europe. **Karl:** Absolutely and I think it's really really interesting for a lot of the people attending TNC to actually hear how these things are actually benefiting and impacting real cases in the world in terms of healthcare and other sectors as well to really drive home you know the reasons why we do what we do and it's going to be really exciting to hear your sessions they'll be in the exchange theater which is in the middle of the TNC partner area which is going to be fantastic we're going to have a really really good crowd in there so I think it's going to be a really exciting day when you're doing your sessions thank you very much. **Paola Crobu:** Thank you. **Paolo Perulli:** Thank you very much bye everybody. --- **End of Transcript - Episode 3**