An agreement among agencies to better interpret the weather determined that the contract is valued at more than 10 million euros. The companies released the following information.
Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Thales (67 percent) and Leonardo (33 percent), 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 theother 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 Krzyzanowski, Chief Executive Officer of CloudFerro.