It is a fantastic news that ITEA has given our PO named “EASI-Clouds” a thumb up and invited us to submit a full project proposal. All the consortium partners from five countries put a lot of effort in preparing a very competitive PO and now more hard work would be required for prepare a high quality proposal that addresses recommendations of the reviewers and national authorities. For the Danish consortium, we need to do much more work as we intend to strengthen our consortium as well as convince the national authorities for the funding because Denmark has not funded any ITEA label project in the past. However, we are very hopeful because EASE-Clouds aims to address the key cloud computing challenges, which are at the heart of a large number of Danish public and private enterprizes. Hence, we intend to work quite hard with our other partner, Alexandra Institute, to attract more partners and funding for this strategically very important project, which will enable Danish researchers and practitioners to work on developing and evaluating cutting edge solutions to key challenges involved in successfully adopting and exploiting cloud computing.

Some of you may be wondering so what is “EASI-Clouds”? Here is a brief about the project.
EASI-Clouds: Extendable Architecture and Service Infrastructure for Cloud-Aware Software is an exciting European level initiative aimed at building critical knowledge, technologies, and expertise in developing and leveraging next generation of Clouds of computing infrastructures and software services. EASI-Clouds has been proposed by a consortium of industrial, research, and academic organizations from Egypt, Denmark, Finland, France, and Germany to carry out an industry-driven and industry-led large scale R&D project. The overall goal of EASI-Clouds consortium is to play a major role in creating state-of-the-art knowledge, technological infrastructure, and competency for helping European companies in business innovation by building world class Cloud-aware infrastructure and services. Following are the main objectives, which will guide the EASI-Clouds activities:

• Develop frameworks, approaches, standards, and tools for building and using cloud-aware infrastructures and software services to maximize the value of investments in large scale IT infrastructures and lowering barriers to enter new businesses and markets.
• Design and implement a reference architecture to deal with the key Cloud computing challenges such as elasticity, scalability, management of data, interoperability, security and cross-border data protection.;
• Develop and deploy new business models for exploiting Cloud-aware software services and infrastructures to increase European Cloud providers.

We are very keen to hear from Danish researchers and practitioners who may be interested in participating in this exciting initiative.