BT, Accenture and Atos are set to supply the European Commission with its first ever set of cloud services in deals worth a total of €34 million.
Various EU bodies will use a mix of public and private IaaS and a public PaaS cloud provided by seven different suppliers under deals that could last a maximum of four years.
The commission, which will co-ordinate cloud use among 56 separate EU organisations, said the technology will help it cut storage, bandwidth and computing costs, "while enabling at the same time innovative solutions for new challenges such as Big Data".
BT's Belgian branch will supply a private IaaS environment that will connect to the commission's private datacentres, in a contract worth €10.2 million.
Meanwhile the public IaaS cloud will be provided by BT, IBM, Accenture, Cloud Team Alliance and Atos in a deal worth €14 million.
A €10.3 million public PaaS environment will be hosted by Telecom Italia, Accenture, Atos and IBM. The commission said this will offer "more than just storage and compute", with other possible features including cloud operating systems and databases.
The commission picked the vendors out of 12 potential suppliers, saying that its tenders were downloaded 3,000 times and generated 450 questions from interested firms.
Corrado Sciolla, president of Europe and global telecom markets at BT Global Services, called the EU cloud deal a "milestone" for BT when it revealed the contract last month.
He 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."
