1

Jean-Charles Point

FUSION Coordinator

pointjc@jcp-consult.com

Jean-Charles Point, JCP-C

pointjc@jcp-consult.com

Presentation summary

• FUSION introduction

• SME situation in experimental facilities

• What we can bring and receive to/from regions/cluster

2

FUSION Introduction

• Acronym: FUSION

• Full Title: Cost Effective Integration and Fusion of SME Communities with

Network Research Tools and Facilities

• Type of Funding Scheme: Support Action (SA)

• Duration: 24 Months

• Work Program Topic: FP7-ICT-2011-8 Objective: ICT-2011.1.6 (e) Call 8

• CONSORTIUM

3

Partner Name Country

JCP-CONSULT SAS France

MARTEL GMBH Switzerland

REDZINC SERVICES LIMITED Ireland

QuartzSpark Limited Ireland

FUSION project objectives

In short: inform SMEs, collect feedback on SMEs requirements and provide recommendations to match experimental facilities offers to SMEs requirement:

•Overall objective:

– To focus specifically on involving SMEs more in the FIRE facilities

•Key sub-objectives:

– Educate SMEs and SME clusters about the FIRE networking capabilities

– Educate the FIRE testbeds about the user requirements from SMEs in certain industry verticals, focusing especially on the network requirements aspects (security, confidentiality, guaranteed capacity reserved, segregation of capacity, process of putting tools together in federation)

4

Project process

6

Presentation summary

• FUSION introduction

• SME situation in experimental facilities

7

Current situation

• Rich offer of experimental facilities (more

then 100)

• More used by academic community (even

in open calls)

• Weak involvment of SMEs:

– In current calls

– Even in more « industry driven » experimental

facilities

Why aren’t SMEs much involved yet?

• Lack of information – Few SMEs in ICT calls

– Complex messages to be delivered

– Contacts complex: clusters, poles, regions, larger networks,…

– Needs very diverse

• Lack of time from SMEs?

• Cost including time spent: – Fundamental issue

– More general issue for SME: to understand the benefits and rewards of experimental facilities

Why aren’t SMEs much involved yet?

• Lack of support from facilities?:

– Some research driven

– Some documentation./ processes lacking

– Support is sometimes given at a cost (more mature faciltiies)

• Problems of confidentiality?

– Disclosure of technologies/ideas

– Insufficient guarantees?

• Offers from testbeds not adequate?

These questions are under investigation

Feedback from a more industrial testbed

• Commercial testbed: cost for support and daily use of the testbed

• SMEs not much involved, and mainly come from collborative projects

• What works: ‘win win’ relation – SME enriches the testbed and receives some tests

results in return

– Commercial interest (tesbed provides additional customers)

– Acceleration of product development

Some early feedback from SMEs on

benefits

• User feedback on their experiment, possibility to adress user requirements on a

professional way during development:

• Understand benefits of user feedback during R&D

• Appreciate support:

• Problem analysis

• Definition of the methodology/panels

• Results analysis

• Access during development to large scale testing facility/heterogeneous ‘real life’

environment with real users

• Independent performance benchmark (compared to customer tests)

12

Some early feedback from SMEs on

benefits (2) • Access to mature tool for testing (no time lost)

• Low initial cost:

• Planetlab as an example: low introductory costs and time to understand

the features

• Access to expertise both from platform team (test definition) and european

projects (specific technical expertise)

• Access to other players

• Additional technical support:

• Prototyping

• Expertise in the products themselves

• Training in the use of the testbed

Type of services

• Very diverse: – Minimal at almost no cost: availability of a large scale

experimental platform (openlab/planetlab) in which an SME can make various tests during R&D stage

– Full support: test definition, set-up and experiment

– User testing (Living Lab like) during R&D and validation: includes full support test definitions and results analysis

• Diverse business models: – FREE use (collaborative model),

– free use + cost for consultancy,

– price per day of use and consultancy

– …

Fed4fire: benefits of a federation

• FED4FIRE federates 13 FIRE facilities (test-bed facilities that each target a specific community within the Future Internet ecosystem)

• Advantages to experimenters: • Easier to find the right resources to translate their

ideas into actual experiments

• Same set of tools and protocols to access the testbed

• Much larger sets of tools and tests available

• Possibility to combine experiment

• Better support and insurance of perrenity

15

Some ways forward

• Clarify the experiment methodology in R&D cycles and gain: – What practical benefits can LL give (product definition, etc…)

– What are the cycles of experiments and benefits (bug fixing, acceleration, etc.)

– Success stories but not enough

• Provide unified interface

• Provide technical support: – Education on tesbted

– Experiments definitions

– Results analysis

– Additional technical support

• Adapt business models (some testbeds are not suited for SMEs)

• Adapt actions to different SMEs categories (technology, size, area,..)

• Find original ‘win win’ situations

Thanks!!!

www.sme4fire.eu

info@sme4fire.eu