European innovation procurement "Pre-Commercial-Procurement" and Cloud computing by reference to the research project "Cloud for Europe"

"Cloud for Europe" represents a major European Cloud research project for the public sector. The first two years of the project were characterized by resolving fundamental questions of Cloud computing in the public sector (legal requirements, adoption) and the preparation of the Pre-Commercial Procurement procedure, whose fulfilment is the main goal of the project. Formal aspects of that procedure have shown the complexity of the new procurement instrument in Europe, particularly in the fields of legal preparations and the procurement processes. Beside the challenges of the formal procedure, the content for the Cloud services (and their definition) was a huge challenge right from the beginning, and in the end satisfactorily solved. The method of "Diverging and Converging" helped for finding highly suitable and mature Cloud services, which have been tendered in three lots and reached high acceptance among the bidders of the PCP tender.