ownCloud Expands Services for Research and Educational Institution

The filesharing specialist ownCloud GmbH announces a further improvement of his joint offer with GÉANT Association for the coming year.

GÉANT is a European collaboration on network and related infrastructure and services for the benefit of research and education.

Universities and other institutions can purchase the open source solution from ownCloud at favourable conditions. The new pricing model ranges from entry-level offers for small organizations to volume-based licensing models for any installation size. The preferential price agreement applies to all members of the GÉANT community and their subsidiary institutions.

The offer represents an improvement on the price agreement between the two organizations, which has already been in place for several years, whereby national and international members of the community can purchase their own licenses of the ownCloud Enterprise Edition. To date, the model has led to the sale of more than 1.5 million licenses in 41 countries.

“With more than 50 million users, GÉANT is an important partner for ownCloud,” emphasizes Christian Schmitz, director strategic accounts, ownCloud, and member of GÉANT’s general assembly. “The close cooperation enables us to supply the entire European research and education landscape with a cost-effective, flexible and secure cloud solution. In addition, both sides benefit from the intensive dialogue within the community.“

Open and stable cloud solution for Europe
“GÉANT has a successful collaboration and long term business relationship with ownCloud“, said Peter Szegedi, senior cloud services manager, GÉANT. “The new educational quotation offer from ownCloud allows our members and their connected institutions to choose the right packages supporting their service models and growth strategy.“

The ownCloud software is easy to install on a web server and allows institutions to host their own file synchronization and sharing, giving IT control over their data, whether they use local or cloud storage. The Enterprise Edition, which is included in the GÉANT agreement, includes special features not included in the free Community Edition, such as branded clients for desktop and mobile platforms, support and maintenance for the company’s own cloud, as well as exclusive access to the developer community, bug fixes and feature requests.

ownCloud is also represented at the GÉANT general assembly, the central administrative body of the research network.