ESA actively promotes uptake of state-of-the-art ICT platform resources for EO exploitation by European research activities.
This uptake phase is supported by opportunities to access these resources free-at-point-of-use, implemented via vouchers mechanisms.
Today two initiatives are in place, one sponsored by ESA, one sponsored by the European Commission allowing research activities to request vouchers that can be spent for commercial EO platform services to accelerate research.
The first Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) call for funding for EO services is now open. It is an important opportunity for research institutions attached to GEANT to get high-volume sponsoring for the use of EO platform services to perform a large scale flagship activity using Copernicus data.
Stay tuned and check the EU Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) for the Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS) for EO service providers to be published in the coming weeks.