The Coordination and Support Actions (CSAs)

The European Cloud, Edge & IoT Continuum is supported by the effort of three Coordination and Support Actions (CSAs). Two of them, namely Open Continuum and UNLOCK-CEI, cooperated from the start focussing respectively on the supply and demand sides of the CEI Continuum, and a third one, NexusForum.EU, bringing topics as the connection with longer-tern research, the IPCEI-CIS project and with ecosystems in Japan and South Korea. This joint work will also benefit from the synergies and legacy of other existing EU projects in the domains of Cloud, Edge, IoT, AI, and connectivity.

The NexusForum.EU project will boost the consolidation of the European Computing Continuum ecosystem building on the valuable activities and impact generated so far by within the existing EUCloudEdgeIoT ecosystem, as well as will provide a forward-looking and bold vision in new areas and directions that have not been explored so far. The 30 months project officially started in January 2024.

In particular, the project has set the following main objectives:

Objective 1: Consolidate the European research, development, and innovation activities and capabilities related to the Cognitive Computing Continuum, and provide a bold long-term outlook and vision for potential research and innovation topics addressing the gaps in EU work programmes.
Objective 2: Monitor the European regulatory landscape and policy activities and initiatives related to the Cognitive Computing Continuum, suggesting ways to align research and technology priorities in key strategic areas with relevant EU policy aspects.
Objective 3: Facilitate collaboration and knowledge exchange between European scientific communities and industrial organisations actively involved in research, development, and innovation activities related to the Cognitive Computing Continuum, coordinating impactful contributions to relevant SDOs, technology providers, open source communities, and pan-European initiatives.
Objective 4: Facilitate engagement at international level with research, industry, and users from different domains/sectors interested in the Cognitive Computing Continuum, especially those based in Japan and South Korea.
Objective 5: Establish and consolidate a new series of inclusive and sustainable annual cross-fertilisation events for the European computing constituency, facilitating development, and innovation activities related to the Cognitive Computing Continuum.

The CEI-Sphere project, officially launched in October 2024, will further strengthen the European Cloud-Edge-IoT (CEI) ecosystem by addressing emerging industry challenges, particularly through Large-Scale Pilots (LSPs).

Key objectives include:

Objective 1: Facilitate Collaboration- Establish inter-LSP cooperation by analysing use cases and deployment environments, creating “Spheres” around key sectors to enhance visibility, foster interoperability, and accelerate collaboration.
Objective 2: Market Insight- Develop a deep understanding of the European CEI market by conducting extensive research, providing feedback to LSPs, and identifying adoption gaps to accelerate market uptake.
Objective 3: Promote Open Ecosystems- Support the growth of a privacy-preserving open edge ecosystem, including SMEs and startups, by defining a minimum interoperability standard and fostering collaboration with strategic industry players.
Objective 4: Build Technological Backbone- Develop Sphere-specific toolkits with technical guidelines, standards, and certification frameworks to ensure scalability and interoperability of cloud-edge solutions across Europe.
Objective 5: Expand Ecosystem Engagement- Create a broad CEI stakeholder ecosystem to generate awareness, organise joint events, and support the evolution of the EUCloudEdgeIoT community.

The UNLOCK CEI project aims at unlocking the potential for accelerating the deployment of the Cloud-Edge-IoT (CEI) computing continuum. The project specifically focuses on the demand side drivers and challenges and the technology-driven innovations and business opportunities driving demand value chains.

In particular, the project has set the following main objectives:

Objective 1: Carry out a systematic assessment of the current state of the European CEI demand landscape, analysing the business opportunities brought by this paradigm change
Objective 2: Define market scenarios for the development of the open European CEI ecosystem and a CEI Readiness Framework
Objective 3: Build and activate the CEI Industry Constituency, i.e., a group of industry stakeholders representing the most important or promising value chains in Europe for CEI potential demand, to aggregate demand needs and identify demand-pull drivers for CEI adoption
Objective 4: Develop a productive and effective interface between the demand constituency and the supply side to improve the market readiness and successful adoption of these technologies
Objective 5: Create awareness of CEI in Europe and generate impact.

OpenContinuum supports the cloud-edge-IoT domain by focusing on the supply side of the computing continuum landscape.Its goal is to foster European strategic autonomy and interoperability through an open ecosystem for the computing continuum, with open source and open standards as two key enablers to be supported and leveraged throughout the community.

In particular, the project has set the following main objectives:

Objective 1: Promote the establishment of a European industrial Open Ecosystem based on Open Source and Open Standards
Objective 2: Map and analyse the supply-side landscape of the European emerging Computing Continuum
Objective 3: Engage the EU industrial and research actors to create a supply-side community that spans the whole Computing Continuum
Objective 4: Coordinate the relevant EU project portfolio towards an open European ecosystem for the cloud-edge-IoT continuum