As part of the Ohr am Netz (“An Ear to the Internet”) podcast, Sidonie Krug speaks with Andreas Weiss, Managing Director of eco – Association of the Internet Industry, which leads the 8ra project FACIS. The conversation is set within the context of the FACIS project and Europe’s broader efforts under the 8ra / IPCEI-CIS framework to build federated, interoperable cloud and edge infrastructures.
In the interview, Weiss explains why interoperability and collaboration across providers are essential for managing complex digital ecosystems, how eco coordinates pre-competitive cooperation within FACIS, and why Europe’s digital future depends on avoiding single dependencies.
Why is FACIS such a strategically important project for Europe’s digital future from eco’s point of view?
Andreas Weiss: Let me try to explain the background first. FACIS is a project within the framework of the so-called IPCEI-CIS. IPCEI stands for “Important Project of Common European Interest.” These are projects that the EU launched some time ago in various fields in order to strengthen the European market, particularly in the digital domain.
IPCEI-CIS stands for “Cloud Infrastructure and Services” and also carries the designation “Multi-Provider Cloud Edge Continuum.” It sounds a bit like Star Wars, but what it really means is that, here in Europe, we don’t have hyperscalers that operate globally at massive scale. Instead, we speak of our European champions as “superscalers” – providers that are large and strong, but not necessarily operating worldwide.
If you look at Europe, we actually have very good offerings in many different segments. This is also reflected in our eco members, some of whom operate regionally, some nationally, some internationally, and yet are still globally connected. The key question for us is: how do we build a joint solution scenario out of this pool of cloud and edge offerings?
That is one part of the objective, at the provisioning level. But these projects also include companies like Airbus, Bosch, and Amadeus – real users of the technology. This allows us to create a link between demand and usage, and I believe that is a very important factor. Hopefully, this will become a cornerstone of Europe’s digital future, and we need to look at this very carefully and actively work towards it.
If I understand you correctly – and please correct me if I’m wrong – this is, in simplified terms, about making it possible for highly complex projects, such as autonomous driving across national borders, to function smoothly. Projects where many components, providers, actors, and modules have to work seamlessly together. FACIS contributes to making that possible. Is that a fair summary?
Andreas Weiss: Yes, by focusing on those connecting elements. If we take autonomous driving as an example, many different services have to interlock. It starts with the mobile network tower – 5G, 6G. We have interconnection requirements, which providers like DE-CIX support at scale worldwide. We may need edge applications, because latency is always a critical issue: how fast can feedback be delivered? Especially for autonomous driving, rapid response is essential.
And then there is the cross-border aspect. We already see this in the 5G world. In the future, we would actually need something like cloud roaming – someone has to manage billing and settlement between different cloud providers. As an end user, I can’t just arrive in Belgium and suddenly my service stops working, or I have to pay significantly more. These are issues we already know from the early days of mobile roaming.
This is highly complex, and we cannot solve it alone. What we do is make proposals. As eco, we try to bring more objectivity into this debate by putting forward concrete ideas that can be discussed. It’s not our role to tell anyone how to do things. But together with our members and the wider community involved, we want to move things in this direction.
So what concrete role does eco play within FACIS, and why is eco particularly well suited to this role as an association?
Andreas Weiss: We are a business association, but we work at a pre-competitive level. That’s very important. We have no commercial exploitation interests in these projects. Instead, we help move things forward and show what is possible.
Another crucial point, which was emphasized again recently, is that as an association we enable dialogue between companies that are in direct competition with one another. This also touches on antitrust issues. But we need this exchange and this space – especially if we think ahead to artificial intelligence, which is a huge challenge for all companies.
We need to be able to exchange ideas and concepts without drifting into legally problematic information sharing. Associations are ideally positioned to moderate and facilitate this kind of exchange.
You mentioned earlier that the European market is characterized by the absence of massive hyperscalers and instead has many medium-sized cloud and edge providers. How do these providers benefit in particular from the federated infrastructure that FACIS is building?
Andreas Weiss: At the technological level, it’s about advancing interoperability in Infrastructure-as-a-Service. There’s a technical term for this: Kubernetes. It’s essentially about how infrastructure resources provided as services are managed. There are many different technological approaches to cloud provisioning, but we need a harmonization layer. If I have to deal with 17 different technologies to formulate an offering, it simply won’t work – the overhead is too high. That’s why interoperability is a core focus here. It means that I can deploy my applications regardless of which provider I use, as long as that provider meets the standard. I can use one provider just like any other.
This significantly increases efficiency and addresses issues such as security, monitoring, and billing. It’s a major step forward, because it tackles exactly this harmonization of digital application deployment.
Sidonie Krug: You’ve spoken about harmonization, open standards, and interoperability, and about the need to establish all of this at scale. What political and regulatory framework conditions are necessary for that?
Andreas Weiss: Eco comments on virtually every idea currently circulating in the political space – and that’s a huge effort. From a pragmatic perspective, we really need to look carefully at where regulation is actually necessary, and if it is, then it needs to be sufficiently concrete.
We have many regulatory initiatives where it’s still unclear how they will be implemented and who will be affected in what way. We see this in the lengthy implementation of NIS2, in security issues, and with critical infrastructure regulation. There is too much uncertainty, and sometimes we even encounter contradictory legal requirements.
I’m curious to see how things develop. There is a trend toward “law as code.” Coming from a software and technology background, I can imagine that if legislation were defined in a machine-readable way and checked for internal consistency, it could help bring more coherence into the legislative process. It’s an exciting approach and definitely worth a closer look.
Digital sovereignty is currently a major buzzword – Europe’s digital sovereignty. We recently had a major summit here in Berlin. What role does FACIS play in Europe’s digital sovereignty? And is there a vision, say toward 2030, of what should be achieved or where the project should lead?
Andreas Weiss: The term “digital sovereignty” carries a lot of weight, and I would personally phrase it this way: feeling sovereign is a very individual decision. First of all, we need to create the framework conditions that make sovereignty possible.
What we are doing with FACIS and 8ra help establish flexible and resilient processes and digital applications without locking ourselves into single dependencies. That’s a key issue. It’s not our job to define a single “Plan A,” but there should always be a Plan B – or even a Plan C. And it’s not us who decide that; it’s the users.
Looking toward 2030, I would very much hope that we have created framework conditions in the European internal market that enable things like cloud roaming. That means harmonization not only in legislation, but also in technical prerequisites.
We need strong European superscalers. We need edge providers. Ursula von der Leyen once spoke about 10,000 edge nodes – and that remains important. We need to be able to handle data cooperatively and ideally generate our own value creation using AI.
That’s really what it’s all about. Digital sovereignty is a very abstract concept. In the end, it comes down to how we can participate in digital value creation. We clearly see imbalances today, and we need to do everything we can to create a counterbalance and real alternatives in Europe.
FACIS creates the conditions for a seamless, interoperable digital infrastructure in Europe. This, in turn, enables scenarios such as autonomous driving across national borders and thus contributes to Europe’s digital sovereignty. Thank you very much, Andreas Weiss, for these insights and background information on the project.
* This interview has been translated into English from the original transcript.
