Paris, France – March 8, 2024 – HBA, the Atos Group business leading in digital, cloud, big data and security today announces that the Sovereign-X consortium, led by HBA, has been awarded the delivery of the “Simpl-Open” contract. This is part of the Simpl program by the European Commission to deliver secure data space middleware platforms which shall become the basis for EC driven sectoral dataspaces and which will become open to use for all data space projects to support interoperability of data spaces across cloud and edge deployments.
HBA in Belgium will manage the Sovereign-X consortium, bringing its expertise from its contributions to existing (associations and organizations’) OSS data space components and its participation in implementing initial data spaces. Consortium partners are Aruba (Italy), Capgemini Nederland (The Netherlands), Engineering International Belgium (Belgium), IONOS (Germany), and COSMOTE Global Solutions (Belgium).
Under this €41 million, three-year Programme contract, the consortium aims to create a secure, trustworthy Open-Source Middleware for sharing data and supporting cloud-to-edge federations. It will give data providers full control over who accesses their data and will facilitate the exchange of information between cloud infrastructures, systems, and applications in an easy, trustworthy, and secure manner.
“As a key native digital player in Europe, we’re proud to be selected as lead for the European Commission’s new SIMPL Consortium, to develop, together with our partners, data spaces that are seamlessly connected and in-line with the EU values and principles of data sovereignty, privacy & fair market.” Said Olivier Clabots, Head of BeLux at HBA, Atos Group.
The Consortium is working to develop “Simpl-Open”, the open-source software package, that will power data spaces and other cloud-to-edge federation initiatives. The Consortium is also supporting the initial feasibility studies for the next two stages of the Simpl programme: Simpl-Labs, an environment for data spaces to test the open-source software and assess their ability to work with Simpl before using it, and Simpl-Live, sector-specific data spaces managed by the European Commission: Public Procurement Data Space, European eHealth Data Space, Language Data Space, Smart Communities Data Space, European Open Science Cloud, and Destination Earth.
