Hewlett Packard Enterprise launches Gaia-X solutions to accelerate data value creation

New era of decentralized data to drive economic and social progress

The European Commission has declared data value creation to be the crucial source of economic and social progress in the next decades. This will be driven by a “new wave” of industrial and professional data, with 80 percent of the overall data volume to be processed in a decentralized manner by 2025.

According to the World Economic Forum, this enables organizations to create “value from data insights” in the form of new revenue streams, new business models, better customer experiences, and better decisions. As an example, McKinsey estimates that the monetization of connected-car data could deliver $250 billion to $400 billion in annual incremental value for players across the mobility ecosystem in 2030. And the European Union’s data economy is forecasted to almost triple between 2018 and 2025 to reach a value of 829 billion Euros.

A radically new approach for sovereign data value creation

However, it’s not certain to which extent organizations will be able to actually materialize these opportunities. According to a global report by IDC and Seagate, only 32 percent of data available to enterprises are put to work. Moreover, according to the European Commission, “currently a small number of big tech firms hold a large part of the world’s data. This could reduce the incentives for data-driven businesses to emerge, grow and innovate.”

Decentralized cloud and data infrastructures take a radically new approach to address that challenge. They enable sharing and aggregation of data, insights, and services at scale without a central intermediary. This creates a level playing field, with power and opportunities distributed across all parties.

Gaia-X is emerging as a focal point of this endeavor. Gaia-X connects centralized and decentralized infrastructures to strengthen the ability to both access and share data securely and confidently. Gaia-X is now entering its operational phase with first flagship projects, and first Gaia-X-compliant solutions are expected to be certified in December 2021. 

HPE is supporting customers to get ready for Gaia-X

HPE is a day-1 member of the non-profit organization Gaia-X AISBL and contributes to the Gaia-X architecture, standards, and certification. HPE is already working with dozens of organizations across Europe to help them get ready for decentralized data infrastructures such as Gaia-X.

One of them is Orange Business Services, a European network-native digital services provider supporting customers worldwide to bring the best innovations with the strongest data protections. “We are helping shape the technical and dataspace foundations of the Gaia-X ecosystem, and we are currently adapting Orange Cloud services to these specifications in order to continue providing the most trusted cloud solutions to our customers within Gaia-X,” says Cedric Parent, Deputy CEO, Orange Cloud. “HPE is a key partner to power Orange Cloud platforms with state-of-the-art technology and capabilities. We benefit from HPE’s deep expertise and solution offering, which comprehensively support the developments needed to fully benefit from decentralized infrastructures such as Gaia-X.”

CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd, the Finnish organization hosting Europe‘s first pre-exascale supercomputer named LUMI, is currently preparing to make supercomputing available as part of an ecosystem of capabilities, where Gaia-X will play a major role. “We are working with HPE to provide trustworthy, secure and efficient supercomputing for research and industry. CSC is happy to provide its solid expertise in handling sensitive data, e.g. for the purposes of health research,” says Pekka Manninen, Director, LUMI Leadership Computing Facility, CSC.

Solution framework for Gaia-X readiness

A central element of the HPE Solution Framework for Gaia-X is a reference architecture that defines the foundation of the components necessary to build Gaia-X use cases. It ensures secure infrastructure operation for decentralized workloads and includes a central governance structure.

The technological foundation is the HPE Ezmeral Software Platform which provides capabilities such as unified access to distributed data and unified control of distributed Kubernetes clusters. HPE also leverages SPIFFE, the Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone, and SPIRE, the SPIFFE Runtime Environment – open-source standards for securely authenticating software services through the use of platform-agnostic, cryptographic identities.

The Cloud28+ business platform enables customers to leverage and monetize their data and services via a marketplace. This platform was originally created as the service catalogue of the Cloud28+ community, and it’s now available to be used by individual organizations, in addition to HPE’s partner network.

An active contributor to the Gaia-X architecture and standards, HPE will equip its solution framework with the required interfaces, connectors and services so customers can seamlessly connect to the Gaia-X platform and ecosystem.

Availability

The HPE Solution Framework for Gaia-X and the HPE Roadmap Service for Gaia-X are available in Europe. Individual solution components and entire solution environments are available via HPE GreenLake cloud services. Gaia-X interfaces and connectors will be made available as soon as Gaia-X specifications are final.