From Report from the European Cloud Partnership Steering Board meeting of 4 July 2013 in Tallinn, 12 August 2013: “On 27 September 2012 the Commission adopted the European Cloud Strategy in the form of a Communication entitled “Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe”, in which it announced the intention to set up a European Cloud Partnership (ECP). Under the guidance of the Steering Board, the ECP brings together public authorities and industry consortia to advance the objectives of the Strategy towards a digital single market for cloud computing. On the 4th of July 2013, the ECP organised its second full Steering Board meeting in Tallinn.” The full report can be downloaded here. Report European Cloud Partnership Steering Board Meeting July 2013
Some thoughts on the two topics discussed:
PRISM: No big surprise to see that on the agenda. Hope is that a high-profile activity like the ECP is not engaging in the just too frequent FUD-type of discussions but will support their strategy and implementation with solid social and technology research.
Cloud Standards: From the report “There is a need to identify minimal standards, based on existing best practices. These should focus on public sector needs, but the private sector is free to adopt these if it sees a benefit to doing so. Past experiences with the GSM standards are recalled, where a strong and forced EU level standardisation push made the EU a global leader in mobile technology.” – To draw a line between GSM and Cloud Computing looks just too typical for the European ICT sector, which is mostly known for their Telco incumbents. It would be interesting to learn more about the actual motivations behind this bold statement. So far, the Cloud Computing sector proves that standards are not needed. Also, since this statement is from a Telefonica representative, this needs to be viewed in the context of Telco standardization efforts beyond communication systems, WAC, GSMA, Parlay/Parlay-X, RCSe to name a few, all of which still have to prove real impact on the Internet.
Cloud for Europe: Is this any connected to the FI-PPP, and most importantly FI-WARE? Or the EGI Federated Cloud? The document refers to a presentation of Helix Nebula but given the fact that Cloud For Europe is a new project (a large one, IP with 20+ partners from 11 EU countries), one risk fragmentation across the meanwhile many different European Cloud research and development activities.