O-CEI Horizon participated in the NexusForum Talk “From Interoperability to Impact: Enabling Real-World Cloud-Edge Adoption in Europe”, a discussion focused on one of the key challenges facing the European Cloud–Edge–IoT ecosystem: how to move beyond successful pilots and transform innovation into scalable, interoperable, and operational solutions.
Representing O-CEI, Project Coordinator Prof. Carlos E. Palau (Universitat Politècnica de València) contributed to the discussion by sharing practical experience on simplifying the deployment and operation of Cloud–Edge–IoT solutions across distributed infrastructures. The discussion addressed some of the major barriers still limiting adoption, including fragmented ecosystems, legacy infrastructures, portability challenges, and the complexity of integrating interoperable AI and digital services across the continuum.
A recurring message throughout the session was that semantic interoperability remains a critical gap for the ecosystem. Participants also emphasized that ecosystem building is not only about technology but also about creating the conditions that enable adoption, collaboration, and long-term sustainability. Interoperability was highlighted as something that should be embedded by design from the outset, rather than addressed later through standardization efforts alone.
The conversation also explored how Europe can move from pilots to large-scale replication across multiple domains and, ultimately, from pilots to sustainable business models. In this context, the importance of demonstrating clear economic benefits was identified as a key factor in encouraging the uptake of sovereign European technologies.
O-CEI’s vision of combining a platform for designing and deploying reusable blueprints with a marketplace for publishing, discovering, and reusing interoperable digital assets was presented as a concrete approach to reducing fragmentation and accelerating real-world deployment.
The discussion reinforced a common ambition across the European Cloud–Edge–IoT community: not only to develop advanced technologies, but to make th
