Thales Alenia
Space / CloudFerro’s consortium will
implement a new service cloud
infrastructure for EUMETSAT
April 29, 2019
Thales Alenia
Space, and the Polish company CloudFerro
announce the signature of a contract
with EUMETSAT, representing also ECMWF
(The European Center for Medium-Range
Weather Forecasts),
and Mercator Ocean International (called
the Partners), for the provision of
cloud computing and related services for
the WEkEO platform. WEkEO is one of the
five Data Information and Access
Services (DIAS) financed by the European
Commission in the frame of the
Copernicus Program. The value of the
contract amounts to over 10 million
euros and covers the provision “as a
service” of the computing, storage and
network infrastructure plus the data
access as well as the processing until
October 2021, unless extended for one or
two additional years.
The WEkEO platform
aims at federating the three Partners
infrastructures and provides cloud
elasticity through a hybrid
Private/Public architecture. Under the
contract, commercial exploitation rights
are granted to the Thales Alenia Space
and CloudFerro Consortium to develop and
propose additional services on a
different platform in a self-sustained
manner.
WEkEO offers data
from the Partners and Copernicus data
from Sentinel satellites, contributing
missions and from the Copernicus marine,
land, atmosphere and climate services.
It features cloud/big data–based hosted
processing and tools in order to bring
the “user to the data” to transform the
data and to provide services meeting
their specific needs or the ones of
their users. This new paradigm presents
two major benefits, on one hand it
reduces the volume of data to be
transferred and on the other hand the
„pay per use” business model avoids
users to invest and operate expensive
ICT infrastructure. The development of
the WEkEO platform starts on mid-April
2019.
Thales Alenia Space
and CloudFerro Consortium : a unique
federative approach
Thales Alenia Space as consortium
representative with its co-contractor
CloudFerro have been able to federate a
strong Consortium, including also ATOS
Origin, GMV, Orange and CLS to cope with
the technical, economic and business
challenges of the WEkEO platform. It
benefits from the best synergies from
several current DIASs and cloud
solutions, bringing new comers with
additional competencies. Thales Alenia
Space as Prime contractor of most of
EUMETSAT ground segments masters large
scale integration and operation of
complex IT systems for Earth Observation
and Meteorological domains. CloudFerro
brings its experience of development and
operation of the Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS) layer for both public,
private and hybrid cloud solutions
proven in CREODIAS and in ECMWF CDS.
“Thales Alenia Space and its partners
are fully committed to providing
EUMETSAT, ECMWF and Mercator Océan
International’s user communities a
unique federative approach of Copernicus
DIAS for the success of WEkEO.”, said
Marc Henri Serre, VP Observation and
Science domain at Thales Alenia Space.
“After our major contribution to Mundi
DIAS, WEkEO shows that Thales Alenia
Space is definitely shaping the future
of Copernicus new ground solutions.
Moreover, with this agreement which
confirms CloudFerro’s expertise, Thales
Alenia Space shows its sustained
commitment to becoming a major partner
in the Polish space industry”.
“I am pleased that
our experience in providing services for
industry clouds, including the space
industry, has been noticed and
appreciated. WEkEO is one of the five EC
DIAS (Data and Information Access
Services) platforms, which provide data
from the Copernicus system, and at the
same time, it
is the second for
which we as CloudFerro provide a
platform that collects and processes
data. This is another project that we
deliver under the European Commission
Copernicus program. It confirms our
ability to provide state-of-the-art
cloud computing services for demanding
and specialized markets - explains
Maciej Krzyżanowski, Chief Executive
Officer of CloudFerro.”