Bob Jones' presentation at the Annual Concertation Meeting of on-going innovation procurement projects

1. Helix Nebula – The Science Cloud with Grant Agreement 687614 is a Pre-Commercial Procurement Action
funded by H2020 Framework Programme
Helix Nebula – The Science Cloud
Lessons learned
ANNUAL CONCERTATION MEETING OF
ON-GOING INNOVATION PROCUREMENT
PROJECTS
Bob Jones
CERN
9 March 2017

2. Helix Nebula Science Cloud Joint Pre-Commercial Procurement
Bob Jones, CERN 2
Procurers: CERN, CNRS, DESY, EMBL-EBI, ESRF,
IFAE, INFN, KIT, STFC, SURFSara
Experts: Trust-IT & EGI.eu
The group of procurers have committed
• Procurement funds
• Manpower for testing/evaluation
• Use-cases with applications & data
• In-house IT resources
Resulting services will be made available to end-
users from many research communities
Co-funded via H2020 Grant Agreement 687614
Total procurement budget ~5.3M€

3. HNSciCloud project phases
and milestones
3
Jan’16
Dec’18
Project
kick-off
19 Jan 2016
Open Market
Consultation
17 March
40+ companies
consulted
Tender
published
21 July
Information
Day
7 Sept
90+ requests for
clarifications
addressed
Tender Deadline
19 Sept
10 Bids received
engaging ~30
companies and
public orgs
Design Award
2 Nov
4 consortia
awarded
contracts
Designs
submitted
30 Jan 2017
4 designs
received,
3 eligible for
prototypes
Prototype
call-off
deadline
13 March
Prototype
Award
3 Apr

4. Financial model
The lead procurer model proved the most appropriate
for HNSciCloud
The ability to include additional procurers in the buyers
group after the Grant Agreement was signed provided
flexibility
This was only possible because CERN took the role of lead
procurer and «anchor tenant» with sufficient financial
commitment and flexibility to accommodate such changes
The obligation to publish the amount of PCP funds
available reduces financial competition
We observed a far smaller variation in financial offers
when compared to non-PCP procurements conducted by
CERN in the ICT domain
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5. Open Market Consultation
The Open Market Consultation (OMC) was important
Planning poker technique successfully gathered rapid feedback in a
competitive environment
We presented the principles of the framework agreement and
encouraged potential bidders to raise legal questions before
submitting their offers
We lacked time for a 2nd OMC event
Gathering feedback on a mature draft of the tender documents would
probably have reduced the number of requests for clarifications
The Tender Information Day helped address many questions and
provided a very useful discussion with potential bidders
But potential bidders did not raise legal points before the signature of
the framework agreement
Gathering feedback on the framework agreement and giving a clear
reminder that it is NOT negotiable would have caused less irritation for
everyone
5

6. PCP instrument
The PCP model needs to be adapted to support service
innovation and product innovation
Restrictions on place of performance of the R&D activities are
not relevant for software services
PCP payment model needs to be more flexible and not be
based on a fixed budget per phase and per contractor
Pay-per-use model is well established in the services market
R&D costs across phases are not the same for services
50% R&D rule for each phase (design, prototype, pilot) limits the
scale of deployments to be tested and hence their impact.
Propose that 50% R&D rule is maintained for whole PCP but
flexibility allowed in each phase
We underestimated the time and effort required
Each call-off requires at least 2 months for the process itself
The effort invested by the buyers group far exceeds that which
could be supported with the coordination and networking funds
(30% of PCP funds)
6

7. Impact of the tender
The tender generated a lot of interest in the cloud services
market
The majority of the submitted bids
were of very high quality
by companies from EU Member States
SMEs were attracted by the tender and have participated in
the bidding consortia
Public sector organisations, such as universities, were
attracted by the tender and have participated in the bidding
consortia
A significant number of FP7 and H2020 projects were cited
in the bids as sources of innovation contributing to the
proposed solutions
If this is confirmed during the implementation phases then it
indicates that PCP offers a potential exploitation path for the
results of EC funded projects
7

8. Impact: Action 2 of the EC communication:
Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe
Cutting through the Jungle of Standards
Standards referenced in the tender:
The ISO/IEC 19086 standard for Service Level Agreements
The ISO/IEC 27000 series of standards, notably ISO/IEC 27017
and ISO/IEC 27018, for information security of the resulting
services
The IEEE 1016-2009 system design document template for the
design of the hybrid cloud architecture
Note: we awarded higher scores to bids
proposing to make the developed software
available via open source licenses
10/03/2017 8

9. Design phase
Prepare detailed information about each use-case, including the desired
performance and technical constraints
Identify an owner, capable of responding to questions, for each use-case
Start the dialogue between the buyers group and the contractors early and
continue during the whole phase
Set intermediate milestones for each contractor to present their progress
Revise the buyers group effort planning when the Request for Tender is
published - take into account all milestones and deliverables to be assessed
and continuous dialogue with the contractors
Establish a technical team of dedicated individuals to collect input from all
procurers on use-cases, requirements, interact with the contractors and
perform tests
More details in the HNSciCloud public report ‘Summary report of the design
stage and lessons learned’ available via the website www.HNSciCloud.eu
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