European Open Source for Europe’s Next-Gen Edge Cloud 🇪🇺

“It may be too late to replicate hyperscalers, but it is not too late to achieve technological sovereignty in some critical technology areas”

President Ursula von der Leyen
My Agenda for Europe: Political Guidelines for the Next European Commission 2019-2024

For the European Union it is essential to build smart technological foundations for how data will be generated, stored, searched, analysed, processed, accessed, shared and exchanged to the benefits of the European economy, its businesses, public entities and communities. The need to strategically invest in the next generation of European cloud and edge capacities has been emphasised on several occasions such as in the European Strategy for Data, in the EU Flagship area “Scale up” under the Recovery and Resilience Facility, and in the Member States’ Joint Declaration on Building the Next Generation Cloud in Europe of 15 October 2020.

In early March 2021, the European Commission presented its 2030 Digital Compass, acknowledging Europe’s vulnerabilities, its increased dependency on critical, often non-EU based, technologies, and the reliance on a few big tech companies, with less than 4% of the top online platforms being European. One of the strategic targets for the EU Digital Decade involves “10,000 climate neutral highly secure edge nodes to be deployed in the EU, distributed in a way that will guarantee access to data services with low latency”.

Against this background, a number of EU Member States, under the coordination of Germany and France, have gathered to offer a common industrial response with significant European relevance. The execution of an of Important Project of Common European Interest (IPCEI) on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services will strategically contribute to fostering European data leadership and digital sovereignty; stronger and sustainable competitiveness of the EU economy and; the flourishing of smart cloud and edge solutions which are highly innovative, fully interoperable, highly secure, fully energy efficient and respectful of privacy. Some of the objectives of this IPCEI include:

• Enable multi-provider Cloud-Edge Continuum
• Strengthening of EU digital industry
• Development of European open source technologies
• Openness and accessibility across Europe

Join us for this virtual event and (re)discover a number of open source technologies that can contribute to bringing Europe closer—and faster—to those objectives  🚀

“Open source impacts the digital autonomy of Europe. Against the hyperscalers in the cloud, it is likely that open source can give Europe a chance to create and maintain its own, independent digital approach and stay in control of its processes, its information and its technology”

European Commission
Open Source Software Strategy 2020-2023