Serco and OVHcloud form partnership in space imagery and Artificial Intelligence

The rapid growth of the space economy has been led by the growing number of satellites sent into orbit, and the increased performance of the onboard sensors in acquiring information. The result has been that an increasing amount of data has been produced and made available to users, which allows the partnership between the two companies to play a key role in exploiting data and usage, enabled by AI technology. This key collaboration will help meet the growing demands of the Earth Observation community.

Thursday, 7th October 2021 Posted 3 years ago in by Phil Alsop

As part of this new partnership, the latest AI technology from OVHcloud will be made available on ONDA DIAS, Serco's cloud platform for Earth Observation which is hosted on the OVHcloud Public Cloud Storage. Serco Europe is already involved in the collection, management and dissemination of Copernicus data.

These programmes will guarantee the highest level of openness and transparency, data sovereignty, European data privacy and security. As Serco and OVHcloud embrace a Platform as a Service (PaaS) strategy, both organisations are also exploring avenues to collaborate in the European start-up ecosystem, exploiting Earth Observation Data (via OVHcloud’s existing Startup Programme) and the marketplace for sovereign Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.

Cloud storage is key to address the challenges that come with the users’ community growing demands. This is evident in the Copernicus Programme which storage volumes reach 35 Petabytes, with an average growth of 800 Terabytes/month.

As the partnership evolves, Serco Europe will beta test OVHcloud Long Term Archive (LTA) solution aiming to constantly improve the cost effectiveness of the storage. OVHcloud LTA will soon be available and will provide users with a unique solution that meets the regulatory requirements for data conservation with an unmatched price/performance ratio.

“Today's announcement represents a new significant milestone in the long-term partnership with SERCO Europe”, says Michel Paulin, CEO at OVHcloud. “we share a common vision based on collaboration, interoperability, privacy and data sovereignty. With this new project we are not only implementing these core values, but we are also proposing new services aimed at monitoring the Earth, a major step forward in the development of the space industry”.

Gaetan Desclee, Serco Europe Managing Director says, "Space and Earth Observation data used to only be accessible to space experts due to its complexity but is now widely available to monitor weather, natural disasters, agriculture and much more." He adds: "We are proud to strengthen our collaboration with OVHcloud and play a key role in making space data easily accessible to a wider range of users. This platform will be an enabler for the new European space economy, and I am pleased to see our two organisations heavily investing in that direction."