Workshop Takeaways: Roadmaps for Europe’s Cloud-Edge Future – Synergies and Opportunities
15, July, 2025
On 7 July 2025, the CISERO project successfully brought together key European stakeholders at the hybrid workshop “Roadmaps for Europe’s Cloud-Edge Future: Synergies and Opportunities”, held in Brussels. This high-impact session was instrumental in aligning strategic European roadmaps towards a trustworthy, sovereign, and federated cloud-edge infrastructure.
The event, initiated and hosted by CISERO (Cloud Infrastructure and Services Exploitation Resources Office), laid the groundwork for strategic coordination between the CISERO roadmap, NexusForum's Research & Innovation Roadmap, and the three thematic roadmaps of the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud. This alignment effort—appreciated by all participating actors—was a central highlight of the workshop, a clear signal of CISERO’s commitment to fostering cross-initiative synergies. As a direct outcome, the dialogue will continue in future engagements, establishing a valuable framework for long-term collaboration.
The three-hour workshop drew over 50 participants in person and online, mostly representatives from the IPCEI-CIS community and research institutions. Matthias Kuom (DLR), CISERO coordinator, welcomed participants by introducing the CISERO project, its role in supporting IPCEI-CIS, and upcoming opportunities for stakeholders engagement.
“CISERO plays a key role in connecting actors across the European cloud-edge landscape,” said Matthias Kuom, Coordinator of CISERO (DLR). “By fostering dialogue and roadmap alignment, we aim to unlock synergies that accelerate innovation and strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty.”
The workshop was divided into two sessions: the first focused on presentations of the three actors’ roadmaps, followed by a dialogue on how to align them strategically. The second session highlighted tangible progress within the IPCEICIS Workstreams, featuring pitches from their coordinators.
Golboo Pourabdollahian (IDC, CISERO partner and mainly contributors to this event) moderated the first session, which featured in-depth presentations of the CISERO roadmap framework, offering both technical and non-technical analyses to address market fragmentation, orchestration challenges, skills gaps, and scaling barriers. The framework identifies five pillars for action: Technological Developments, Skills Development, Procurement, Growth & Investment, Governance. Each is designed to contribute to a competitive and sovereign European digital infrastructure. The dicussion highlighted the urgent need for a shared language across roadmaps, essential for fostering collaboration and coherence between national and industrial strategies. Golboo Pourabdollahian emphasised the importance of strengthening Europe’s position in cloud-edge-IoT and AI to secure digital sovereignty and competitiveness. Key areas she highlighted included technological gaps, open standards, skills development, scaling challenges, and practical approaches to digital sovereignty.
“Europe must assert leadership in strategic digital technologies if we are to achieve true sovereignty,” noted Golboo Pourabdollahian, Senior Consultanting Manager at IDC. “Bridging gaps in orchestration, skills, and open standards is not just a technical necessity—it’s a strategic imperative.”
The second session was dedicated to the IPCEI-CIS Workstreams presentations, which are essential to the operational goals of IPCEI-CIS projects and therefore very important to CISERO’s mission. Industry leaders from Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, TIM, Siemens, Engineering Group, and E-Group ICT Software shared insights into critical developments across infrastructure, federation, data services, and application domains.
Key takeaways included:
- The necessity to reinforce European leadership in cloud-edge, AI, and green technologies to achieve true digital sovereignty.
- The urgent need for interoperable orchestration tools, underpinned by unified APIs and reference architectures.
- The pivotal role of open-source governance rooted in Europe for ensuring security, trust, and innovation.
- Concrete steps to bridge skills shortages in emerging technologies, including EU-based certification and training frameworks.
- The importance of shared infrastructure blueprints and collaborative use cases to validate the multi-provider cloud-edge continuum in real-world industrial environments.
Throughout the workshop, speakers repeatedly stressed the importance of trust and sovereignty as fundamental principles in shaping Europe’s cloud-edge future. Stakeholders shared a common concern over current reliance on non-European providers, highlighting risks such as vendor lock-in, lack of transparency, and extraterritorial data exposure. Open standards and open-source technologies emerged as key enablers for addressing these concerns, ensuring auditability, interoperability, and long-term sustainability.
For CISERO, this moment served also as a valuable opportunity to liaise with IPCEI-CIS community and to understand the real needs of projects, aligning them with demand-side analysis, and addressing gaps in the CISERO roadmap.
The workshop concluded with a strong consensus on the importance of continuous dialogue, and next steps include a follow-up webinar on 22 July, which will delve into the CISERO Reference Architecture and present ongoing contributions to the alignment of Europe’s cloud-edge strategy.