Almost everyday we witness the rise of new cloud technologies, services and solutions. Despite the existing gap, with the US giants the European Cloud Community (ECC) is growing and leading the creation of Single Digital Market in Europe. Still, to strength such market, its fragmentation needs to be reduced. Beyond that, European market is largely dominated by SME that are struggling to adopt cloud services (beyond email and cloud storage) to innovate their business due to the lack of “cloud-culture” and trust toward cloud services. European Commission is leading a number of key actions (e.g. GDPR) to overcome these and other barriers, but it requires the help and the support of the ECC, in terms of a common technology vision, policies and recommendations. While strengthening the Digital Market is beyond the capabilities of European research funding programmes, a clear mandate is to lead the definition of the Strategic Innovation and Research Agenda for Cloud Computing that should provide recommendations and strategies to guide the future of European Cloud services and their market regulations. H-Cloud addresses this challenge by creating a sustainable forum of stakeholders representing the Cloud Computing research, industry and users with the aim to define a common vision for the future of Cloud Computing in Europe. Based on the outcomes of previous actions, H-Cloud will establish the ECC forum as a live community of organisations and individuals that will collaborate around different themes with the aim of addressing challenges and opportunities at research, technological, policy, standardisation and organisational level. The creation of a common vision on Cloud Computing, will be the key to unlock the potential of Cloud Computing to support the creation of a Digital Single Market. Through an open governance model and valuable incentives, H-Cloud will ensure that ECC Forum will outlast the project duration, becoming a valuable asset of the whole ECC.

UNLOCK CEI’s ambition is to UNLOCK the potential for accelerating the deployment of the Cloud-to-Edge-IoT (CEI) computing continuum in Europe by focusing on the demand-side drivers and challenges to identify technology-driven innovation and business opportunities driving demand value chains. The project represents the CEI demand constituency; provide insights and guidance to the Horizon Europe R&D projects in this domain; and contribute to a proactive dialogue with the supply stakeholders to encourage the development of an open European CEI ecosystem. It focuses on emerging value chains where investment is needed to foster the deployment of the Cloud-to-Edge-IoT continuum through the forthcoming CEI large scale pilots. This will ultimately foster European autonomy in the digital economy. The workplan is designed to provide early results to feed into the development of the HE Work Programme in 2023-24 based on the ongoing dialogue with the stakeholder ecosystem. The project pays specific attention to data governance issues, leveraging the relationship with industry-driven initiatives such as Gaia-X and CCAM (Connected, Co-operative & Automated Mobility) partnership. UNLOCK carries out a systematic assessment of the state of the open European CEI ecosystem and develop future market scenarios and related market pathways for the development of the open European CEI ecosystem. It will engage with industry stakeholders representing the most relevant industry value chains in Europe for CEI potential demand and develops a productive and effective interface between the demand constituency and the supply side, including the coordination of HE projects resulting from CL4-2021-DATA-01-05, CL4-2022-DATA-01-02, and CL4-2022-DATA-01-03 and Cluster 3 cybersecurity projects. It finally designs and implement a coordinated communication and dissemination strategy running throughout the lifetime of the project to create awareness about the whole of the European demand-side landscape.