2015 started with the beginning in March of the second flagship project of EGI, EGI-Engage, which shifted the focus on the users and opened an era of fruitful collaboration with many Research Infrastructures on the ESFRI roadmap: BBMRI, DARIAH, EISCAT-3D, ELIXIR, EPOS, LifeWatch, MoBrain and disaster mitigation competence centre.

This year we established our strategy for 2015 to 2020 which explores what EGI has to offer, as well as its vision, mission and strategic goals for the coming years. We also developed the Open Science Commons vision. This initiative is in line with the Open Science Cloud initiative of the EC, and created the path for the first joint position paper of EGI, EUDAT, GEANT, LIBER, and OpenAIRE, which defined the foundations of open science service provisioning for Europe.

EGI continued to strengthen its international liaisons in 2015: we signed an agreement with Compute Canada which reflects the common goal of providing computing services to international research collaborations. Moreover, this year we saw the launch of two exciting projects – INDIGO-DataCloud and AARC – that bring together a myriad of European companies and institutions from multiple disciplines.

It was also a year of consolidating the EGI Federated Cloud after its launch in 2014 and of reinforcing the technical roadmap with two new platforms under development: the open data platform for the publication of open data produced in EGI and the reuse of existing research data, as well as the accelerated computing platform to provide federated access to HPC computing.

Last, but not least, we are proud to have organised two flagship events this year: the EGI Conference in Lisbon and the EGI Community Forum in Bari.

At the end of this rewarding year, we would like to thank the EGI family for all their efforts and contributions and we are looking ahead to new projects and challenges in 2016!