Commission awards €41 million contract to develop infrastructure for Common European Data Spaces
The Commission has selected a consortium that will develop ‘Simpl' – a secure middleware platform that will support data access and interoperability among European data spaces, unleashing the power of data-driven innovation.
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It aims to create a secure, trustworthy platform for sharing data, and supporting cloud-to-edge federations and Common European Data Spaces. Common European Data Spaces will create data ecosystems that users in similar sectors will have access to. This needs to be done in an efficient and safe manner. Simpl will address this by giving data providers full control over who accesses their data. Moreover, it will facilitate the exchange of information between cloud infrastructures, systems, and applications in an easy, trustworthy, and secure manner.
The consortium was awarded a €41 million contract to develop Simpl. Led by Eviden Belgium, it consists of Aruba (Italy), Capgemini Nederland (The Netherlands), Engineering International Belgium (Belgium), IONOS (Germany), and COSMOTE Global Solutions (Belgium).
Over the next three years, the consortium will: develop Simpl-Open, the open-source software that will power data spaces and other cloud-to-edge federation initiatives; design Simpl-Labs, an environment for data spaces to test the open-source software and assess their ability to work with Simpl; design Simpl-Live, data spaces - the Public Procurement Data Space, the European eHealth Data Space, the Language Data Space, the Smart Communities Data Space, the European Open Science Cloud, and Destination Earth.
Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President for a Europe fit for the Digital Age, said:
I am pleased to see work on Simpl get started with the consortium. Simpl will help us achieve our goals in data sharing and beyond, giving us a trusted way to share data. In due course, this will unleash our potential across data-driven areas.
