Speaker
Sy Holsinger
(EGI.EU)
Description
EGI currently operates within the publicly funded academic research environment providing services free at point of delivery with resources funded from grants dedicated to certain groups or disciplines either by direct allocation or by peer review. With the advent of cloud computing, business models and user expectations are shifting towards on-demand and pay-per-use service provision increasing flexibility and agility which creates opportunities to areas of research that have more intermittent demands for computational resources. This new paradigm provides motivation for EGI to explore new service definitions by enabling the possibility to provide ICT services that can be paid for the use, along with the more traditional procurement of resources to be managed and offered for free to the owners.
In addition, sustainability of EGI requires a multifaceted approach. One aspect of EGI's strategy is the increase of business development activities and the potential addition of pay-for-use models. To achieve such a result depends on community engagement from a wide range of both technical and non-technical competencies to implement.
In early 2013, the EGI Council approved a policy to explore business models for pay-for-use service delivery to couple together with the traditional method of free-at-point-of-use. The goal of this activity is to support the implementation of this policy in collaboration with NGIs through the definition and execution of proof of concepts. The mandate of the pilot was to create a proof of concept pay-for-use prototype. Activities will continue through EGI-Engage in order to move the prototype into production.
This short presentation provides a high-level summary of the main activities, results achieved, and recommendations moving forward.
