The four-year cloud contracts have a total value of more than $26 million
U.K. telecommunications group BT won two contracts with the European Commission for the provisioning of public and private cloud services across 52 major European institutions, agencies and bodies.
Some of the agencies included in the contracts are the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Defense Agency. The two contracts were awarded in December and will be valid for four years. The contracts have a combined value of more than 24 million euros ($26.1 million). These are the third and fourth European Commission framework contracts that have been awarded to BT in 2015, all of them following open calls for tenders.
BT’s cloud services will be hosted from several data centers located within the European Union in a move to provide high resilience and guarantee all customer data will remain within the EU. They are also set to be integrated and managed from BT’s Compute Management System.
Last August, BT signed a framework contract with the European Commission, with a value of up to 15.2 million euros over seven years. That contract included voice services across 21 major European institutions, agencies and bodies. This followed a large framework contract signed in March 2015 for the delivery of dedicated Internet access to all major European institutions, agencies and bodies across the 28 member states. This five-year contract has a maximum value of 55.7 million euros.
Ericsson, Huawei extend global patent license agreement
Swedish vendor Ericsson and Chinese ICT services provider Huawei extended a global patent license agreement between the two companies. The agreement includes a cross license covering patents relating to both companies’ wireless standard-essential patents (including the GSM, UMTS and LTE cellular standards). Under the agreement, both companies are able to access and implement the other company’s standard essential patents and technologies globally.
As part of the renewed agreement, Huawei will make ongoing royalty payments based upon actual sales to Ericsson beginning this year.
“This new agreement reflects the two leading companies’ joint view that innovation and intellectual property rights shall be protected, and reasonable compensation for the implementation of intellectual property rights is vital to promoting technology innovation, sharing and standardizing technology, driving and accelerating industry evolution,” explained Jianxin Ding, head of global intellectual property at Huawei.
