Driving innovation across Cloud, Edge & IoT
During July we attended a two-day, in-person Project Implementation Committee (PIC) meeting hosted at the University of Piraeus in Athens, Greece. As the project hits the six-month milestone, the gathering provided a valuable opportunity to reflect, realign, and accelerate progress toward its ambitious vision of building a sustainable, cross-domain Cloud-Edge-IoT (CEI) ecosystem.
Aligning ambitions with action
This meeting brought together a diverse range of partners, from academic institutions and industry leaders to SMEs and innovation hubs, for a highly focused session on implementation.
The agenda was thoughtfully divided into two key sessions:
- A comprehensive review of all eight pilots, alongside discussion on upcoming open calls, communication and dissemination activities, standardisation planning, open-source pathways, and clustering with other initiatives.
- A deep dive into the architectural backbone of the O-CEI platform, the discussions centred on platform design, marketplace development, and the user portal interface.
The meeting was more than just a checkpoint; it was a momentum-building milestone. The level of partner engagement and shared ownership of the project’s long-term impact was clear in every exchange.
O-CEI
Funded under Horizon Europe, O-CEI (Open CEI) is a large-scale Innovation Action running from January 2025 to June 2028. It brings together 58 partners from 20 countries to address a key challenge: how to integrate cloud, edge, and IoT technologies into a seamless, cross-domain platform that supports real-time data sharing, minimises energy use, and scales across sectors.
Together, we are building:
- An open digital platform that enables multi-sided marketplaces for services, data assets, and AI models
- Reusable blueprints for CEI deployments, complete with reference implementations and automation tools
- Federated identity and access solutions to guarantee secure, privacy-respecting integration
- Distributed machine learning systems that support energy flexibility and emissions reduction
- AI-powered development tools to accelerate trustable, explainable CEI software
- Foundational standards to support interoperability and cross-sector replication
To ground its innovations in real-world applications, O-CEI is running eight large-scale pilots across verticals such as: renewable energy and smart grids, electromobility and software-defined vehicles, agriculture and smart logistics, urban environments and smart cities, 5G infrastructures for energy-efficient transport.
Each pilot serves as both a testbed and a demonstrator, ensuring the O-CEI platform is ready to tackle Europe’s most complex and urgent digital and green transitions.
What’s next?
With preparations already underway, O-CEI will launch two Open Calls starting in early 2026. These will offer up to €4 million in funding to support external organisations in piloting, scaling, or extending the platform. It’s a key mechanism to bring new voices into the ecosystem and strengthen adoption across Europe.