A marriage made in heaven: A European Digital Single Market united with Cloud28+

This past fall Jean-Claude Juncker ushered in his European Commission presidency by listing his number one priority as “policies that create growth and jobs” via the creation of a “Digital Single Market for consumers and businesses.” His goal in numbers? Over 300 hundred billion euros of additional growth in Europe and hundreds of thousands of new jobs – facilitated through an open, federated digital marketplace.

Why is the Digital Single Market so critical to Europe?

As part of the digital transformation of the world’s economy, data and data services have increasingly become value drivers of products and services. As value chains become digitized, a shift in power or influence – intended or not – can occur between those companies that dominate a particular digital platform and those who use these platforms for their services and products. With today’s digital services market dominated by mega American and Asian powerhouses, where those platforms are based and how their services are executed naturally impacts if and how European customers can leverage them for business-class services.

The European economy, in its present structure, faces other competitive disadvantages when it comes to the expansion and uptake of digital services compared to the digital markets of the United States and China in particular. Start-ups in the United States, for example, have access to a relatively uniform market consisting of over 300 million inhabitants and plenty of investment capital.

In the EU, a start-up must adjust its digital offerings according to 28 different market conditions – in regards to data privacy, digital document storage, and data security to name just a few areas – the cost of which reduces its margins. In fact, small online businesses are estimated to spend around 9000 Euros in extra costs associated with the need to adapt to various national laws. Combined with a relatively restrained investment culture in Europe, this is a difficult environment to kick-start a digital company, let alone a prosperous digital economy.

Under these circumstances, it’s clear that isolated national initiatives taken alone, such as a German or French cloud, would not be enough to solve the region’s problems. A Digital Single Market, on the other hand, would benefit from more than 500 million inhabitants.

To tap into this huge prospective market, Europe must build upon its own political culture and EU heritage. With hefty regulatory hurdles, weak digital clusters and low investment capital we cannot mimic the free play of the U.S. markets, nor do we aspire to replicate centrally-controlled structures that exist in other parts of the world.

Europe's path to digitization must be federal. Rather than rely on centralism, protectionism, or on the market power of large suppliers, it should feed on the “power of many.” Competition and partnership must remain basic principles on this journey.

We need a means to raise the potential of our diversity – without falling into digital centralism or monopolism.

The intersection of a Single Digital Market and cloud

Never has a computing concept been so helped and hindered by its own marketing hype as cloud. As companies have come to realize that cloud provides just another IT delivery model amongst others, the subject has become less polarizing, as customers seek to evaluate the best delivery model for their business requirements.

As such, cloud remains central to the expansion of the European digital economy. In 2012, market research firm IDC calculated that the European cloud market could generate up to 3.8 million jobs by 2020.

Despite the potential for growth, a recent study by Eurostat revealed that only one out of five European enterprises (or around 19 percent) even use cloud services. “Lack of knowledge,” not security concerns, was ranked the number one barrier to adoption.

Contributing to this low information state, the cloud world is often erroneously portrayed as synonymous with big public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings, only one avenue customers may want to explore.

Given the fragmented nature of the European economy, it’s no doubt European companies and public entities have had few places to turn for services that match both their business needs and their local market conditions. Likewise, developers have had little incentive or opportunity to create and make available tailored services that go beyond their own borders.

A single European cloud – as a sub-set of the broader objective of a single digital economy – would allow companies of all sizes to dramatically increase their customer base, while providing increased access to knowledge-based business services.

Cloud28+: A cloud of clouds, made in Europe and secured locally

To accelerate cloud adoption in Europe and provide new business opportunities for local cloud service providers, HP has initiated Cloud28+ – a “cloud of clouds,” made in Europe and secured locally. A federated community of Service Providers, resellers, ISVs and government entities, Cloud28+ offers an online catalogue of trusted cloud services linked to different workload requirements.

By connecting their own catalogues or clouds of applications, service providers in the community can offer end customers a broader range of applications, while expanding their own geographic reach. End users in turn can search for cloud applications according to a host of criteria, including geographic location and price. The central cloud repository provides a unified framework in terms of terms and conditions and security. By working through a local IT partner, end customers also gain access to the quality of service and respect for local market conditions to which they adhere.

Cloud28+ combines a central platform – in this case more of a cloud service library – with the distributed development of cloud services and the subscription to those services and execution of them via local IT service providers. Just as the world’s largest taxi company, Uber, owns no cars, Cloud28+ owns no data center; instead, it forms a catalogue of cloud catalogues.

If a Service Provider in Spain for example designs a smart city cloud service for Madrid and then publishes that service on the Cloud28+ platform, a Service Provider in the UK looking to roll out a similar service for the city of London could discover it in Cloud28+ and then subscribe to it via the UK Service Provider and execute it locally in its own data center for data privacy reasons.

To ensure Cloud28+ remains open to all vendors and service providers, while easing interoperability issues, HP advocates the use of open source technologies, including the leading, non-proprietary cloud operating system OpenStack. At the same time, Cloud28+ benefits from HP’s ongoing investment and leadership in HP Helion OpenStack, including significant contributions in terms of funding, resource allocation, testing, code, and training.

From research to action: Cloud poised to come into its own

HP is already working with the EU on a number of OpenStack-based projects underlying the architecture of a secure, trusted and legally secure European cloud. After contributing to the Contrail project, focused on open computing infrastructure for elastic services tied to interoperability and SLAs, HP was selected to lead the A4Cloud project, which highlights accountability as the most critical prerequisite for effective governance and control of corporate and private data processed by cloud-based IT services. HP also leads the Coco Cloud project, linked to security and privacy in the cloud.

Most recently, HP announced that it is in charge of designing, implementing and managing the STORM Clouds platform for hosting public authorities’ “cloudified” services. As the principal IT partner for STORM Clouds, HP is helping to establish seamless, sustainable cross-border public services, paving the way for municipalities across the EU to become “smart cities.”

The insights and technical advancements gained from these projects in turn nourish the Cloud28+ ecosystem.

The fate of the European Digital Single Market relies on the success of a single, European digital cloud

Digitization, said President Juncker, is Europe's path to growth. While not easy to achieve, the fate of the European Digital Single Market relies on the success of a single, European digital cloud. In just one year, the Cloud28+ community has tripled in size from 52 to 150 active participants, demonstrating an increasing adherence to a federated, partner-based approach. Only by spreading the benefits and relevance of cloud – both for providers and end customers – can we pave the way to a unified European cloud market, drive growth and innovation, and accelerate the digital transformation of the economy.