Belnet Cloud Solutions - Admin FAQ

About OCRE

What is OCRE about?
What categories of organizations can benefit from OCRE?
What types of services OCRE offers?
What is the relation between OCRE and EOSC?
What is the relation between OCRE and Copernicus?
What is Belnet's role?

About suppliers

Which suppliers are available for Belgium?
How can I contact the suppliers?
How to know the commercial advantages offered by each supplier?
How do you sign a contract with a supplier?

GÉANT IaaS+ Marketplace

How can I find all the information on framework agreements, suppliers, prices, offers and legal content even faster?
How can I receive the OCRE Fl@sh Newsletter from Belnet?

 

What is OCRE about?

OCRE (Open Clouds for Research Environments) is a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Union that aims to enable and facilitate research institutions to use commercial digital services in a safe and easy manner. The Consortium delivering the project includes GÉANT (coordinator), CERN, RHEA and Trust-IT.

What categories of organizations can benefit from OCRE?

All organisations connected to Belnet are eligible to use the "OCRE Cloud Catalogue".

Which suppliers are available for Belgium?

The OCRE Catalogue displays the compliant Cloud-based digital service providers who have been contracted to supply the European Research and Academic communities by means of the OCRE framework.

There are 12 suppliers for Belgium:

• Bechtle (Azure and Ionos)
• SoftwareONE (IBM)
• Sparkle (GCP)
• Rackspace (AWS)
• Safespring
• CloudSigma
• CloudFerro
• T-Systems (Open Telecom Cloud)
• Setcor
• Quistor (Oracle)
• Orange (Business Services)
• VSHN (Exoscale)

What types of services OCRE offers?

Commodity-type commercial digital services necessary for interdisciplinary research activities. Such services include:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS): 
  The provision of compute, storage, network and related services and/or a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage applications, as a public cloud service.
• Software as a Service (SaaS), on-demand software offerings: 
  A software licensing and delivery model in which software is used by the customer on a subscription basis and is hosted by the supplier as a public cloud service, in the areas of file storage (sync and share), online collaboration, simulation and virtualisation tools.
• Earth Observation (EO) services:
  Data collected by the European Earth Observation programme, Copernicus, made available through a number of Data and Information Access Services (DIAS). Data collected by the European Earth Observation programme, Copernicus, will be made available through a number of Data and Information Access Services (DIAS). The services provided by these companies range from interactive data analytics, to specific information. OCRE will enable the commercial service providers who create their front-office services on top of these back-end DIASes, to offer their services to the research community.

What is the relation between OCRE and EOSC?

OCRE will make selected commercial digital services an integral part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), ensuring compliance with EOSC requirements and visibility in the EOSC-hub Service Catalogue.

What is the relation between OCRE and Copernicus?

OCRE will encourage more EO Services on the Copernicus DIAS, the Data and Information Access Services providing centralised access to Copernicus data and information, as well as to processing tools, enabling the research community to find and consume these services.

What is Belnet's role?

Within the framework agreement coordinated by GÉANT, Belnet takes on the role of referrer. This means that Belnet acts as an intermediary by making the framework agreements available in Belgium and facilitating the purchases of the connected institutions from the suppliers. As a referrer, Belnet receives starting July 2023 a 3% commission on the volume purchased by each organisation. However, the contractual relationship is between the organisation connected to Belnet and the supplier, there is no contract with Belnet.

How can I contact the suppliers?

1. Click on "Visit the catalog" on the site
2. Select Belgium on the map of Europe and the list of suppliers will be presented to you.
3. Click on contact to send an email to the desired supplier.

How to know the commercial advantages offered by each supplier?

To find out about the different offers and discounts offered by each supplier, contact our Product Management unit.  

How do you sign a contract with a supplier?

Belnet acts as a referrer and can guide you in making the right decisions and getting in contact with the right people. Contracts are signed between the institution and the partner/provider itself.

Contracts can be immediately started. The OCRE tender is conducted under the procurement law of the Netherlands (NL), called AW12. This procurement law conforms to EU procurement directive 2014/24/EU with some national implementation specifics.

How can I find all the information on framework agreements, suppliers, prices, offers and legal content even faster?

By clicking on the image below you will find The one-stop shop IaaS+ Marketplace where you can quickly obtain everything from all the tender and call off documentation in one place for your country. These include:

• The Framework Agreement with the Cloud Service Provider or Reseller.
• Scope of Services offered by the Cloud Service Provider
• Pricing Information
• Call Off agreement between your institution and the Cloud Service provider

Click on the image:

The GÉANT IaaS+ Marketplace was developed by the GÉANT community, for the GÉANT community. The Marketplace allows institutions to procure IaaS cloud services fast, efficiently and cost-effectively.

How can I receive the OCRE Fl@sh Newsletter from Belnet?

Fill in the form to subscribe to our OCRE Fl@sh newsletter.