Cloud Computing Center

the Cloud Computing Center (3C) is starting. It is going to be a platform for MSc, doctoral students, university staff and industry experts. Platform for all who are interested and enthusiastic about cloud computing. The core of the 3C are PhD students and the target is education, research and commercialization.
The Czech universities are typically focused on basic research with very weak links to the industry. This is not only a problem of the universities. The Czech SMBs do not have enough funding and internal resources to work with universities. The global IT players do not conduct research in the Czech Republic. They view us only as a pool of good programmers. In many cases companies also do not believe the university can effectively help them solving practical problems in their business.
On the other hand the university staff is interested in pure research and academia people do not want to get their hands dirty with the everyday programming etc. The academia people are not looking for research funding in the industry they concentrate on governmental funding. On top of this academia people and industry speak different languages, they have problems understand each other. 
3C has the ambition to bridge this gap at least in one segment of IT. If we manage to get university working with industry it will be beneficial for all society, industry and academia too. The best benefit for the university research, I believe, is the motivation and feedback coming from users, from industry and society. The benefit for the industry is also clear, they get the best innovation and technology.
You may ask, what is the difference between 3C and software company? The software companies have business motivations, they need to earn money. They have the urge of executing projects in the most efficient way to stay competitive. This is limiting a space for programmers to test new approaches or develop innovative solutions. The main 3C vision is the research as a driver for innovation, practical implementation and evangelization  of latest technologies, paradigms, frameworks etc. 3C researchers need to prove their quality by writing top scientific contributions as well as deploying and commercializing their ideas in the industry. Similarly, I want to evaluate the students not only based on the quality and number of publications, but also on their impact to industry. After all this should be easy to measure in terms of funding coming from the industry. In some sense 3C should act as a technological start-up.
Next time I would like to point out the main technical directions for 3C.