Voices from the 8ra Ecosystem
What does Europe’s emerging cloud-edge ecosystem look like in practice? In our interviews, we speak with the people shaping 8ra from different perspectives: project leads, technology experts, new ecosystem members, policymakers, decision-makers and stakeholders from across Europe.
Through video and written interviews, they share insights into their work, their motivation and their view on how 8ra can contribute to a more open, interoperable and sovereign digital infrastructure for Europe.
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© TIM S.p.A. „Federation is not just a technical matter“
In an ecosystem with around 120 partners, technology is just one piece of the puzzle. An equally important challenge is whether projects, providers and countries can align on how their systems should work together. That question is now central to Mauro Boldi, Chair of the IPCEI-CIS Facilitation Group.
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© DLR “Cloud providers need more choice, flexibility and sovereignty”
With the ApeiroRA project, SAP aims to develop a reference blueprint for an open, flexible, and secure next generation cloud-edge infrastructure. Mike Cosse explains how project partners joined forces with the Linux Foundation Europe to establish the NeoNephos Foundation.
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© Pēteris Ārājs | © Jānis Kampars “Digital twins should be reusable, not rebuilt from scratch”
Urban digital twins are widely seen as a powerful tool for city planning. Most implementations are developed as stand-alone solutions, which makes them costly and hard to transfer. In our interview, Jānis Kampars & Pēteris Ārājs describe how a modular platform can simplify how digital twins are developed and operated.
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© Ákos Tényi & Antal Kuthy “When data is distributed, AI should work that way too. “
In this conversation, Antal Kuthy, Founder & CEO of E-Group, and Akos Tenyi, who leads E-Group’s Federated AI (FedX)I product line, describe how their Hungarian IPCEI-CIS project FedEU.ai approaches that challenge through federated learning and distributed compute. Instead of moving data, their systems move models and intelligence to where data already lives.
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© Erik Langius “Our mission is to move away from closed ecosystems and create a genuinely open European cloud environment.”
Erik Langius works at TNO, the Netherland’s Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, and is the project coordinator for the Dutch IPCEI-CIS project ECOFED. In our interview he explains, in which ways the architectural design of 8ra helps to build a federation that works in a fully distributed way.
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© Arsys “We have the advantage that we are many.”
As the Manager of Arsys Lab – the innovation laboratory for Arsys – Javier Arnáez argues that Europe’s competitive edge lies in cooperation and a deep commitment to digital sovereignty. In this interview, he highlights how an interoperable cloud infrastructure and strategic AI use can pave the way for a resilient European digital transformation.
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© Michel Iñigo, MONDRAGON Corporation “Interoperability is the key to scaling industrial AI.”
European manufacturers want AI that works across mixed equipment and sites without losing control of their data. In this Interview, Michel Iñigo Ulloa gives insight into how MONDRAGON together with the 8ra ecosystem is building an open, interoperable stack that keeps decisions at the edge and governance with each company.
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© Fondazione Bruno Kessler Archive “Identity becomes the new perimeter of security.”
Silvio Ranise is Director of the Center for Cybersecurity at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) and Professor at the University of Trento. In this conversation, he shares his perspective on how digital identity, AI at the edge, and the Lab8ra testbed are shaping Europe’s path toward a resilient and interoperable Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum.
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© Giovanni Frattini “Scale up, make technology usable!”
In this interview, Giovanni Frattini from the AVANT project, shares his vision for the future of digital infrastructure in Europe. He argues that the next wave of digital transformation must be scalable and usable, and that a federated model is designed to achieve this by building a “toolbox” of interoperable solutions.
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© NBIP “We have to get smart.”
Our new interview series highlights the leaders shaping the Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum across Europe. In June, we talked with Octavia de Weerdt, General Director at NBIP, a Dutch non-profit that helps digital infrastructure providers meet compliance and security needs through shared services. She explains how cybersecurity could become Europe’s strategic edge.