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Bechtle, one of Europe's leading IT system integrators, headquartered in Neckarsulm, has once again won lots in the European cloud tender for research and educational institutions, OCRE (Open Clouds for Research Environments). As part of the project, contracts were awarded for a total of 39 European countries last November. In thirteen countries, Bechtle is among the selected providers together with its cloud provider partners IONOS and Microsoft. The five-year framework agreement, which starts in February 2025, follows on from the 2020 OCRE call for tenders, in which Bechtle, with the same partners, had already been awarded the contract as an IT service provider in nine countries.

The OCRE 2024 framework agreement, put out to tender by GÉANT, the pan-European federation of National Research and Education Networks (NREN), is designed to simplify the procurement of cloud services for a large number of research and educational institutions in Europe. A wide range of commercial cloud services is available to those entitled to purchase via standardized contractual terms and call-off contracts. They can choose directly from several providers or award contracts in a small competitive procedure.

The “IaaS+” package includes not only cloud services from the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) area (e.g. computing power, data storage and network), but also defined services from the PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) application areas. In addition, supplementary services such as design consulting, onboarding, training and migration services can be used via the framework agreement. Bechtle offers Microsoft Azure and IONOS cloud services through OCRE 2024 in thirteen countries: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Poland.

“OCRE has proven to be a sustainable driver for the use of state-of-the-art cloud technology. The framework strengthens the development and expansion of high-performance IT infrastructures for artificial intelligence, machine learning, container environments, and platform services. We look forward to continuing to support the research and education landscape in Europe as a cloud service provider in the years to come,” says Manuel Liesenfeld, Senior Director Public Sector Division, Bechtle AG.

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