Press releases

Thales Alenia Space / CloudFerro’s consortium will implement a new service cloud infrastructure for EUMETSAT

Press releases

Thales Alenia Space / CloudFerro’s consortium will implement a new service cloud infrastructure for EUMETSAT

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    Cannes, Warsaw, April 29, 2019 - Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%), 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.”


    EUMETSAT
    The European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites is an intergovernmental organization based in Darmstadt, Germany, currently associating 30 Member States. Its main task is the implementation of European satellite meteorological observation systems and sharing data with partners. At the request of the European Commission, as part of the Copernicus project, EUMETSAT together with the European Space Agency implements a project of using satellite data for the monitoring of the atmosphere, oceans and climate change.
    More information of this contract here:
    https://www.eumetsat.int/website/home/News/DAT_4357239.html

    ECMWF
    The European Center for Medium-Term Forecasts is an independent intergovernmental organization cooperating with 34 countries. The ECMWF is also a research institute and an institution preparing and disseminating numerical weather forecasts for member states. For the European Commission, the ECMWF performs atmosphere monitoring as part of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring System and climate change monitoring (Copernicus Climate Change Service).

    Mercator Océan International
    It is a private, non-profit company based in France, near Toulouse. Mercator Ocean International deals with the creation of meteorological forecasting systems based on ocean data. The company cooperates with many scientific and research institutions, and for the European Commission it implements the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service project.

    CloudFerro
    CloudFerro is a leading Polish provider of cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Founded in 2015 by a group of experienced managers from the IT and telecommunications industry, CloudFerro provides customers with private, hybrid and public cloud computing, dedicated servers and data storage services.
    CloudFerro solutions are based on the open source OpenStack cloud system. CloudFerro specializes in large scale data storage, processing and dissemination platforms. Its current data holdings exceed 15PB of data.
    CloudFerro provides cloud processing services to several institutional and scientific customers in the space sector, including ESA with the CREODIAS platform and ECMWF with the Climate Data Store hybrid cloud platform.

    CloudFerro Press Contacts:
    Maciej Litewski
    Phone: +48 532 461 444
    Email: mlitewski@cloudferro.com

    Thales Alenia Space
    Combining 40 years of experience and a unique diversity of expertise, talents and cultures, Thales Alenia Space architects design and deliver high technology solutions for telecommunications, navigation, Earth observation, environmental management, exploration, science and orbital infrastructures. Governments, institutions and companies rely on Thales Alenia Space to design, operate and deliver satellite-based systems that help them position and connect anyone or anything, everywhere, help observe our planet, help optimize the use of our planet's – and our solar system’s – resources. Thales Alenia Space believes in space as humankind’s new horizon, which will enable to build a better, more sustainable life on Earth. A joint venture between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%), Thales Alenia Space also teams up with Telespazio to form the parent companies’ Space Alliance, which offers a complete range of services and solutions. Thales Alenia Space posted consolidated revenues Thales Alenia Space posted consolidated revenues of about 2.5 billion euros in 2018 and has around 8,000 employees in nine countries.
    Thales Alenia Space – Press Contacts:
    Sandrine Bielecki
    Phone: +33 (0)4 92 92 70 94
    Email: sandrine.bielecki@thalesaleniaspace.com
    Chrystelle Dugimont
    Phone: +33 (0)4 92 92 74 06
    Email: chrystelle.dugimont@thalesaleniaspace.com
    Cinzia Marcanio
    Phone: +39 06 41512685
    Email: cinzia.marcanio@thalesaleniaspace.com