Anna Forrester
The Commerce Department will work with Amazon.com, Google, IBM, Microsoft and the Open Cloud Consortium on a big data project to figure out how to apply environmental data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for efforts to support the U.S. economy.
Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker announced the cooperative research and development agreements Tuesday at the American Meteorological Society forum.
“As America’s data agency, we are excited about these collaborations and the opportunities they present to drive economic growth and business innovation,” she said.
“[This] announcement is another example of our ongoing commitment to providing a broad foundation for economic growth and opportunity to America’s businesses by transforming the department’s data capabilities and supporting a data-enabled economy.”
Each “anchor” company will lead a data alliance to perform research and test cloud-based offerings that will host collaborative development work on NOAA’s data, the department said.
These agreements are the result of NOAA’s solicitation for approaches to distribute its data to the public and industry to facilitate innovation, from which it selected the proposals from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM, Microsoft and Open Cloud Consortium.
