13 November 2023, Brussels, Belgium: The Gaia-X 4th Summit, Gaia-Xcelerate, took place under the auspices of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union and in partnership with Gaia-X Hub Spain, on 9 and 10 November in Alicante, Spain. It witnessed an unmatched gathering of visionaries, industry leaders, and pioneers, providing groundbreaking insights into the evolution of the Gaia-X initiative and its significant contributions to the trusted digital ecosystems.
Catherine Jestin, Gaia-X Board of Directors Chairwoman and Executive Vice President Digital and Information Management, Airbus, and Ulrich Ahle, Gaia-X, CEO, shared the incredible Gaia-X Journey from Inception to Market Adoption, emphasising the initiative’s vision to enable trusted decentralised digital ecosystems. The mission is to establish Gaia-X as the de facto standard by developing policies, rules, specifications, and a verification framework aligned with EU values.
Gaia-X unveiled its strategic plan to drive innovation, collaboration, and globalisation
- End-user Adoption Strategy: Gaia-X aims to boost end-user adoption by increasing reference stories, garnering support from policymakers, collaborating with Cloud Service Providers, and expanding its presence in inactive European countries.
- Market Readiness of the Technology: Collaboration with DSBA and FOSS communities, strengthening partnerships, and showcasing Data Spaces based on a federated Cloud infrastructure are key elements to ensure the market readiness of Gaia-X technology.
- Globalisation Strategy: Gaia-X is actively partnering with international members, involving other regions in label definition, participating in global events, and fostering analyst relations to increase awareness globally.
- Growth of the Gaia-X Ecosystem: The initiative is committed to optimising committees and agile sprints, welcoming new members, and maximising global reach and impact.
Gaia-X Digital Clearing House: Your Gateway to Compliance
The GXDCH is up and running! GXDCH serves as the ultimate hub to ensure compliance at the service level. The Gaia-X Lab, Aruba, and T-systems are running the services. Projects are integrating GXDCH Credential Service Events, synchronising their catalogues seamlessly. SMEs are in for a game-changing opportunity – easily showcase your services and data in Gaia-X catalogues, thereby accelerating your business growth, andexperience streamlined contract negotiation, supervised and automated, to expedite your digital transformation.
“The positive participation from our members in utilising the Gaia-X Clearing House has been noteworthy. The first version is up and running, and we extend an open invitation to everyone to make use of it to build interoperable federated data infrastructure ecosystems,” added Pierre Gronlier, Gaia-X CTO.
Our mission extends beyond compliance. Gaia-X is driving the digitalisation of the value chain, focusing on interoperability, globalisation, and trust.
Gaia-X expressed its support for International Manufacturing-X (IM-X), an initiative aimed at making data work for smart manufacturing on a global scale. Gaia-X is set to play a crucial role in ensuring interoperability, trust, and security in the connected world.
Roland Fadrany, Gaia-X COO, emphasised that “Gaia-X provides a lean trust framework that allows everybody to remain on their technology stack while participating in this new and broad ecosystem.”
The summit highlighted Gaia-X’s global strategy, emphasising innovation, collaboration, and sustainability. Gaia-X strikes a balance between European providers and hyperscalers, fostering a future where industry ecosystems seamlessly connect and thrive on a global scale.
“We’ve learned that Gaia-X Digital Clearing Houses are up and running; we have a clear structure of building blocks on how to build data spaces, and first, data spaces are a reality. We are supporting global collaboration; the international Market-X initiative is an excellent example of this, and we have an updated, clear strategy on how to achieve our targets,” summarised Ulrich Ahle, Gaia-X CEO.
Catherine Jestin, Gaia-X BoD Chairwoman and Executive Vice President Digital and Information Management at Airbus, extends her heartfelt appreciation: “Thanks to the contributors of the Gaia-X Projects, you are making Gaia-X a reality. Your dedication is not just shaping technology; it’s shaping the future we envision together.”
Alberto Palomo, Chief Data Officer – National Data Office, State Secretariat for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, Government of Spain, added that “Spain has put forward an informal call-to-action for a coherent and coordinated response within the European initiatives and programmes for cloud data and Artificial Intelligence. Due to the distributed and heterogeneous nature of the European Data Economy, we believe collaboration and interoperability is the optimal choice for a Trustworthy Data value-proposition.”
Pearse O’Donohue, Director for Future Networks at DG CNECT, emphasised the vision of “a common European data space – a genuine single market for data.” Pillars include seamless data flows, fair rules, next-gen cloud capacities, and the availability of high-quality data to drive innovation.
Exciting times lie ahead as Gaia-X continues to shape the future of trusted, decentralised digital ecosystems. The summit showcased the power of collaboration, innovation, and technology convergence under Gaia-X rules.
A final word of thanks goes to our partners, Dawex, Aruba and Casa Mediterráneo.
About Gaia-X:
Established in 2021 as a privately funded not-for-profit Association, Gaia-X brings together an international industrial, academic, and political community with the aim of building a common standard for transparent, controllable, and interoperable technologies in order to enable the creation of common data spaces, and in doing so boost the European data economy.
Open to anyone but aligned to the European values of human-centricity, transparency, openness and sovereignty, Gaia-X’s ambition is to deliver unprecedented opportunities for innovative data-driven business models reducing the dependency from non-controllable technologies.
Press Contact:
Cosmina Gantner, Communications Director
Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud
+32499397519
