As a member of the Belet R&E community you can benefit from the OCRE 2020 framework agreement, managed by GÉANT (the pan-European research network). This framework agreement aims to defend the interests of the research and education community and offers all organisations connected to the Belnet network the possibility of accessing various Cloud solutions from a range of vendors and service providers at a reduced price.
Moreover, it relieves your organisation of a large part of the work involved in awarding contracts, as it is no longer necessary to issue your own call for tenders, as the ready-made agreements comply with European and national regulations. You can read more about the current framework agreement and its various benefits here. The OCRE 2020 framework runs until end 2024 but can be extended for at least one year, or longer depending on the provider/partner.
GÉANT is currently preparing the procurement of the next Cloud framework contract, ‘OCRE 2024’. It is anticipated that the procurement phase will start in the first quarter of 2024 and the new framework contracts will become available from 1 December 2024.
Just like the previous one, the new ‘OCRE 2024’ tender will aim to procure a broad and varied portfolio of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings, plus Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. All institutions with a Research and or Education focus are eligible to consume these so-called IaaS+ solutions without prior registration.