2025-10-01 –, OSPO, governance and business
Europe faces the challenge of achieving digital sovereignty and innovation across a fragmented cloud landscape. The 8ra Initiative (IPCEI-CIS) is a pan-European, industry-driven response: it focuses on building a Multi-Provider Cloud-Edge Continuum (MPCEC), based on openness, interoperability, and resilience. With more than 120 partners across 12 member states, 8ra aims to create a European alternative to closed hyperscaler models - embedding Open Source as a guiding principle for governance and technology. By building the necessary components for a so called Multi-Provider-Cloud-Edge-Continuum stack, organizations will no longer be tied to a single provider and can run cloud-native applications wherever they choose. The developed open source components support, that data can be processed locally where it is produced, reducing latency, environmental burden, and data transfer costs by combining cloud and edge resources from multiple sovereign providers. Only an open source development will ensure the necessary acceptance to truly create a powerful ecosystem from the diversity of domestic providers.
Within this framework, driven by the ApeiroRA project, NeoNephos, a foundation hosted by the Linux Foundation Europe, ensures the long-term sustainability of 8ra outcomes. By integrating the components of the stack along the IPCEI-CIS Reference Architecture (ICRA), NeoNephos provides an open, neutral reference model that is community-driven and collectively governed.
This talk will highlight:
• How 8ra concretely contributes to Europe’s Open Source community through deployments, open APIs, governance models, and sustainability principles.
• How the NeoNephos foundation structures and sustains this effort.
• What contributions and impulses NeoNephos and the other projects seeks from the Open Source community.
Attendees will gain insights into how industrial and community interests can converge within an open, sovereign cloud ecosystem.
At DLR (German Aerospace Center) Matthias Kuom is currently coordinating the 8ra initiative, a strategic European endeavour dedicated to establishing a resilient, open and future-proof digital infrastructure. And he is head of the CISERO CSA that supports the IPCEI-CIS projects in the exploitation of their results
From 2019 to 2023 he was Seconded National Expert to the European Commission, Directorate General for Communication Networks, Content and Technology, in the unit CNECT.A.4 "Digital Transformation of Industrial Ecosystems". Here he worked on topics such as digital platforms for industry and implementation of Digital Innovation Hubs within the Digital Europe Programme.
He drives forward the topics of Cloud, Industry 4.0, Data Spaces as well as business models and innovation strategies in the data economy. He is passionate about the international networking of forward-thinking innovation players.