Cloud community project launches in Europe

EuroCloud will promote cloud computing and offer best practice guidelines

The first online business community to support the deployment of enterprise cloud computing was launched in the UK on Tuesday.

EuroCloud will be led by a team of seven cloud experts, each responsible for co-ordinating the community in a different country. Phil Wainewright, chief executive of consulting firm Procullux Ventures, will head up the project in the UK.

"I'm supporting the EuroCloud initiative in the UK because it represents a tremendous opportunity to promote best practices and the business benefits of software-as-a-service and cloud services across Europe," he said.

"Cloud computing is a major force for aligning IT with business requirements, delivering results faster and with greater visibility and transparency to actual IT costs.

"EuroCloud will raise public awareness of these benefits and accelerate adoption, helping European businesses to remain competitive in today's globally connected economy."

The community evolved from the French ASP Forum, a similar but local initiative that has now become EuroCloud France.

The French ASP Forum had more than 70 members drawn from IT cloud service providers and integrators, which included the French divisions of companies such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. The expansion of ASP Forum into Europe will mean that these companies' other local divisions will be asked to get involved.

EuroCloud will share advice and offer input to businesses on how best to deploy cloud services, according to Wainewright. It will also try and ensure that future European legislation enhances cloud computing.

The French ASP Forum was led by Pierre-José Billotte, chief executive of Sourcia, who came up with the EuroCloud concept. Billotte will now head up the whole EuroCloud initiative.

Countries signed up to the community so far are the UK, France, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain and Finland.