The European Commission has signed £26.6m in contracts with a whole host of IT service providers in order to develop its cloud capabilities. BT won the majority of the contracts; as a result, the EC will be spending £7.7m with BT over the next four years for its private cloud service.

IBM, Accenture, ATOS and Cloud Team Alliance all signed deals to provide public cloud for the Commission, while Telecom Italia, Accenture, ATOS and IBM were also chosen to provide platform-as-a-service operations.

Corrado Sciolla, president of BT Global Services in Europe, said: “This is a milestone in our journey to be the leading global cloud services integrator, and demonstrates how we minimise the complexity, risks and costs for our customers as they move to the cloud.”

An official from the EC commented: “The Cloud will enable the Commission to follow the ceaseless pace of today’s technological race among infrastructure providers where costs of storage, bandwidth and computing power are decreasing day by day while enabling at the same time innovative solutions for new challenges such as big data.”

The contracts agreed for private and public cloud provision will be valid until 2020.

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