SMEs and public sector organizations increasingly investigate the possibilities to use cloud computing services in their everyday business conduct. Accessing services and resources in the cloud on-demand and in a flexible and elastic way could result in significant cost savings due to more efficient and convenient resource utilization that also replaces large investment costs with long term operational costs. On the other hand, the take up of cloud computing by SMEs and the public sector is still relatively low due to limited application-level flexibility and also security concerns. The Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application (COLA) project aims to increase the adoption of cloud computing services by the above mentioned two strategic target communities. Typical industry and public sector applications require resource scalability and efficient resource utilization in order to serve a variable number of customers with dynamic resource demands, and to suitably optimize resource consumption and costs. However, the dynamic and intelligent utilization of cloud infrastructure resources from the perspective of cloud applications is not trivial. Although there have been several efforts to support the intelligent and coordinated deployment, and to a smaller extent also the run-time orchestration of cloud applications, no comprehensive solution has emerged until now that could be applied in large scale near operational level industry trials. The overall objective of the COLA project is that by building on and extending current research results, it will define and provide a reference implementation of a generic and pluggable framework that supports the optimal and secure deployment and run-time orchestration of cloud applications. COLA will demonstrate the applicability and impact of the solution via large scale near operational level SME and public sector pilots and demonstrators, and will also define a clear pathway how the innovation can be delivered to the market.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is essential for the digitalization of the manufacturing sector; notwithstanding, less than 25% of the manufacturing companies in Europe profit from ICT-enabled solutions. In order to democratically boost the competitiveness of the European manufacturers (especially Small and Medium-sized Enterprises - SMEs), innovative solutions need to consider technological and commercial scalability from the beginning. From this perspective, the cloudification of services has become the ideal enabler in the manufacturing digitalization. Successful European initiatives such us CloudFlow, cloudSME or Fortissimo have demonstrated the benefits of cloudification for engineering services, by means of combining HPC resources, computational tools, and cloud computing platforms. Manufacturing SMEs are empowered to compute and solve problems that cannot be tackled without cloud and HPC technology, making them more competitive by reducing development times for innovative product with better performance. The results of these initiatives are fostering the engineering and to some extend the prototyping processes within the manufacturing workflow; however, monitoring and optimizing production processes have not yet greatly benefited from an integrated information workflow and simulation loop based on on-line factory data. The core partners of CloudFlow (eu-cloudflow.eu) and cloudSME (cloudsme.eu) are joining forces to leverage factory data with cloud-based engineering tools: a) paving the way toward manufacturing analytics, b) enriching the manufacturing engineering process with on-line data, and c) simulating and optimizing the production process with the vision to support it in real-time. The consolidated platform between CloudFlow and cloudSME with extended capabilities to process factory data is going to be accessed through a central interface, enabling the stakeholders to interact, and collaborate.