EGI Sustainability – Clearer Skies
Over the last year, there have been numerous discussions, meetings, articles and reports trying to address the complex issue of EGI sustainability. The latest installment of this multi-facet activity, took place in a full-day workshop “Sustaining the EGI ecosystem” at the EGI Community Forum in Munich. This workshop laid out all of the pieces of the puzzle that have been defined over the course of activities, and then carefully reassembled within a framework from which to build providing clearer skies towards the EGI of the future.
The more than 100 participants were provided with a complete picture and concrete examples for how to build a business model within the defined EGI2020 strategy and around the evolving EGI service portfolio. It encouraged the participants to understand where they fit within this strategy and identify the skills and services they can provide and through which mechanisms to provide them.
This EGI collaborative framework starts by a defined EGI2020 strategy including four key strategic investment areas, then outlines the services to be provided that will expand the user base as well as the components of the ecosystem for which roles and functions to deliver them. Bringing everything full circle is the final part of defining business models around this vision.
Following the session, a first ‘use case’ example was provided through an EC-project, Contrail, which performed a mapping of services within the presented EGI Business Models patterns to deliver a variety of cloud services as a Technology Provider, Platform Integrator and Platform Operator.
Overall, the EGI vision requires a more proactive bottom-up approach where the individual components of the EGI Ecosystem drive their individual futures and a shift in mentality compared to the practices that have taken place over the last 10 years. To ensure a sustainable, open infrastructure for decades to come, EGI must break down the protective walls of the monolithic project structure to fully flourish as open ICT ecosystem. In turn, this will result in expanding the user base potential and both an inward and outward flow of services and technology.
What is evident is that there is no silver bullet to achieving sustainability, but is an intertwining combination of a variety of different roles, services, capabilities, and values delivered across the EGI ecosystem.
As the business model patterns get refined in an upcoming deliverable report (D2.18), who will be next to showcase their business model?
