Europe makes it rain for cloud biz: £30m of gold showered on BT, IBM etc

The European Commission has announced what companies will supply the organization with its new cloud services. Contracts were broken out into three "lots," covering a private cloud setup, public cloud setup, and platform-as-a-service, for which it will pay a total of €34.6m (US$38.5m, £26.6m). Despite having received 20 …

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting signal trend, watch space

The question in the sub-heading indicates this might be a political statement, expressed via contracts.

IBM and co can certainly deliver private cloud to EU data barns. In fact EU could conceivably do it themselves, if savings were the goal and they had any cloud architects. But then, when did any government truly worry about savings?

The relatively modest sum of 30 M is a small relief. Putting that in perspective, (at 240 K Euro a year per commissioner), that could cover 16 Eu commissioners salaries for the next 10 years. Let's hope the EU gets more bang for their euro-bucks or at least saves some money (and finishes the project). When you look at the horrendous sums spaffed on other IT gov projects, 30 M is relatively small beer.

Could be the first feeler installment in a series of lucrative maintenance deals for the above mentioned companies. Stick in the eye for all US companies? Not really, unless you are a public CSP like Microsoft and AWS. And they will certainly be smarting, thinking about how to get back into public Euro markets. Perhaps, they will start lobbying harder for smarter US senators and policies. By the time EU is ready to use public cloud, there may be saner laws regarding data sovereignty and privacy. Crazy, I know, but we can always dream of a better future.

Is it a nail in the coffin for any future Safe harbor clone? Well, a cheap hammer has definitely been raised in the air. Private cloud is one of the easiest (if not always the cheapest) ways to benefit from emerging tech solutions. Could mean some tech jobs will be going soon in Brussels.

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Re: Interesting signal trend, watch space

"But then, when did any government truly worry about savings?"

They do. When potential savings might eat into the profits of valued contributors to party* funds.

*Not PAAARTY!!!, the other kind.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Interesting signal trend, watch space

Given all the recent Safe Harbor kerfuffle, it could be that the EU wanted to see companies that took data isolation seriously, something which IBM has done in the past even when hosting broad.

[tiggity]

A & A

Accenture & Atos involved- does not bode well

[Smoking Gun]

Re: A & A

What do ATOS do? It seems they sub everything out and just cream a bit off the top for management fees, for all we know ATOS's cloud services are actually Microsoft Azure and AWS anyway?

[banalyzer]

never known this one

It doesn't say explicitly that it hopes to save money, presumably to avoid being embarrassed later

If they could actually be embarrassed for wasting other peoples money rather then being embarrassed being caught doing it then that statement would have some validity.

Not that I think it's a waste in this case, but more along the lines of ensuring that EU specific data stays within EU borders.

Won't stop the creepy boys but then what would?