Bechtle once again awarded lots for European OCRE tender

• Bechtle offers cloud services for research and education in 13 countries
• Cooperation with partners Microsoft and IONOS
• Framework agreement to run for five years from February 2025

Neckarsulm, 10 January 2025 – Bechtle has once again won lots for the European tender of the Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) project. Contracts for a total of 39 European countries were awarded last November with Bechtle and its cloud provider partners, IONOS and Microsoft, winning contracts for 13. Beginning in February, the contract will run for five years and carries on from the 2020 OCRE tender, for which Bechtle and these same partners were named IT service providers for nine countries.

Put out to tender by GÉANT, the pan-European collaboration of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), OCRE 2024 aims to ease access to cloud services for a host of research and education institutions, which gain access to a wide range of commercial cloud services available with standardised contractual terms and conditions and as call-off contracts. Eligible institutions can choose from several providers or award contracts on the basis of small competitive processes.

The scope of services designated as “IaaS+” includes cloud services from the IaaS area (Infrastructure as a Service, such as computing power, data storage and network) as well as defined services from the PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) application areas. Furthermore, supplementary services such as design consulting, onboarding, training and migration can also be leveraged. As part of OCRE 2024, Bechtle is offering cloud services from Microsoft Azure and IONOS in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK.

“OCRE has proven itself to be a driving force behind the use of cutting-edge cloud technology. The framework fosters the development and expansion of powerful IT infrastructures for artificial intelligence, machine learning, container environments and platform services and we are delighted to be able to offer our continued support to European research and education over the next few years as a cloud service provider,” says Manuel Liesenfeld, Senior Director Public Sector Division, Bechtle AG.