Let’s go, Innovation Action COLA!

The Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application (COLA) Innovation Action [project ID: 731574] aims to increase the adoption of cloud computing services by the above mentioned two strategic target communities, SMEs & public sector. Typical industry- and public- sector applications require resource scalability and efficient resource utilization in order to serve a variable number of customers with dynamic resource demands, and to suitably optimize resource consumption and costs.

Nowadays cloud computing is more common and the need to use cloud computing in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as well as in public organizations rapidly increase. The additional value for SMEs is obvious – there is no longer the need to make large investments with long term operational costs, instead they can use cloud based services on demand to meet their needs effectively and cost-efficient. On the other hand the take up of cloud computing by SMEs and the public sector is still relatively low due to limited application-level flexibility and also security concerns, the new project “COLA” aims to increase the security, usability and flexibility of cloud based services.

The overall objective of the COLA project is that by building on and extending current research results, it will define and provide a reference implementation of a generic and pluggable framework that supports the optimal and secure deployment and run-time orchestration of cloud applications. COLA will demonstrate the applicability and impact of the solution via large scale near operational level SME and public sector pilots and demonstrators, and will also define a clear pathway how the innovation can be delivered to the market. The Innovation Action “COLA” will start at January 1st and will run for 30 months.

The “COLA” project includes 14 companies out of 6 different countries from Europe, including the United Kingdom, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Germany. The coordinator of the “COLA” project is Dr. Tamas Kiss, University of Westminster (UK), the University of Westminster already coordinated the cloudSME FP7 research project.

The University of Westminster is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Westminster's academic activities are organised into seven faculties and schools, within which there are around 45 departments. The University of Westminster is represented in the consortium by the Research Centre for Parallel Computing (CPC), a distinguished and recognised university research centre.