H-CLOUD kick off!

The H-CLOUD project held a kick off meeting in Brussels on 15 January 2020. The project started with an intense and fruitful meeting with the DG Connect Unit E.2 (Cloud & Software) team.

The meeting with the EC focused on how H-CLOUD can support the European Cloud Computing Community (Industry and Research) in the challenges ahead and support the community in ensuring that relevant challenges are covered in EU programmes.

The European Commission put the accent on many relevant research and policy topics, such as ‘Green’ Computing and its role in making Europe more sustainable, Cloud Federation as a way to open up new opportunities in the Digital Single Market, and Cloud Edge as a pivotal change in the data processing economy and in the European market.

Federico Facca, Martel Chief Technical Officer and Head of Martel Lab said:

“The H-CLOUD plays a key role in supporting the European Commission to shape future work programmes by bootstrapping the analysis of the European players in the Cloud computing market, and coordinating the Cloud computing community in the creation of a strategic research and policy agenda.”

H-CLOUD Kick off discussed these matters and first priorities to bootstrap the project activities.

With the transition toward a new programming period for the European Commission, and the upcoming launch of new programmes such as Horizon Europe, Digital Europe and Connecting Europe Facility 2, the project is extremely timely.

H-CLOUD will be holding a workshop on 1 April at the European Commission in Belgium.

The workshop, ‘Horizon Cloud – Identifying Challenges and Priorities for the future of European Cloud Computing’ welcomes the wider community of Cloud Computing researchers to join H-CLOUD and the European Commission to discuss the challenges and priorities that future work programmes should tackle.

The event will have a common session in the morning and separate workshops dedicated to different priorities in the afternoon (with a closed number of participants).