Italian industry and research are teaming up in the leading European digital policy project. Politecnico di Torino, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, ENEA, together with Engineering, Fincantieri, Reply, TIM and Tiscali will create a shared testing environment aimed at enhancing the outcomes of 8RA, the project funded by the European Union as part of the IPCEI program (Important Project of Common European Interest). The goal is to promote the interoperability and integration of cloud offerings in Europe, increase public and private investments in Edge and Cloud technologies, and facilitate the entry of new companies into the market, thereby fostering the growth of the ecosystem.
In December 2023, the European Commission authorized the implementation of the first IPCEI focused on technologies aimed at building a European value chain for Cloud Infrastructure and Services (CIS), with state aid amounting to over €1.2 billion across Europe, approximately €409 million of which was allocated to Italy.
This initiative represents a further step in the collaboration between industry and research in Italy, enabling both Italian and international companies to experiment with and integrate innovative technological solutions specific to various sectors and, more broadly, to the industrial domains in which they operate, leveraging the Edge platforms developed by the partners. Collaboration is, in fact, one of the fundamental technological enablers of the IPCEI-CIS project, designed to create a seamless continuum between the cloud resources of the various partners involved.
The testing environment will provide a shared platform where each partner can leverage, in an integrated manner, the resources developed by all members of the group to conduct experiments, feasibility studies, and project validations. This collaborative approach also aims to optimize efficiency, accelerate the development of advanced technological solutions, and amplify their adoption during future phases of product industrialization.
This phase of collaboration represents the first step toward the commercial use of the project's outcomes, outlining a model that can be further expanded. Through this testing environment, in fact, it will be possible to certify the validity of complex projects in a shared context, unlocking new opportunities for the development and adoption of cutting-edge technological solutions.
Rome, 16 December 2024
