Deutsche Telekom's IT subsidiary T-Systems and NTT Communications, two leading global telecommunications service providers, join forces to provide a dataspace test environment in Japan. This initiative aims to accelerate the development of new data ecosystems in Japan and achieve interoperability between Europe and Japan. The partners will provide the first dataspace sandbox development environment based on open source software from the Eclipse Foundation projects Tractus-X and Eclipse Dataspace Components used by leading data ecosystem initiatives, such as Catena-X for the automotive industry.

T-Systems and NTT Communications collaborate to realize data sovereignty

T-Systems and NTT Communications are both active contributors in several dataspace-related communities in Europe, such as Gaia-X, International Data Spaces Association (IDSA), and Catena-X Association. Deutsche Telekom is a founding member of Gaia-X and it's T-Systems unit has been the first operator of a Gaia-X Digital Clearing House and a key developer of Tractus-X software. NTT Communications has also contributed by starting discussions about the internationalization of trusted dataspaces, demonstrating the interoperability concept in cooperation with Japanese and European initiatives. This joint initiative can leverage the expertise and reputation of their parent organizations' telecom businesses. As neutral providers offering lifeline reliability and the highest assurance of data privacy and security, they can facilitate data exchange across organizations and jurisdictions, such as global supply chains, while ensuring data sovereignty protection.

New dataspace sandbox accelerates creation of data ecosystems in Japan

For this sandbox T-Systems will provide its Living Lab product, a dataspace-as-a-service development environment to be adapted by the partners for Japanese organizations, universities, and companies. The sandbox will be operated on a cloud infrastructure in Germany and accessible to users and engineers in Japan through NTT Communications' international testbed, operated on a cloud infrastructure in Japan. This setup will facilitate the development and use of application and enablement services in a dataspace environment, accelerating proof of concept activities for inter-company data chains in various verticals in Japan. From the third quarter of 2024, T-Systems will provide a first Living Lab sandbox through NTT Communications to Japanese organizations, universities, and companies including IDSA Japan Hub, the University of Tokyo, Keio University, Fujitsu and OMRON to test the interoperability with their testbeds, connectors and application services, and to increase the number of developers and users of dataspace in Japan.

Towards realizing trusted multi-regional dataspaces

NTT Communications and T-Systems plan to conduct joint tests in late 2024 to confirm the interoperability of two regional dataspaces. They will test core federated services, such as identity, onboarding, data transfer, and service discovery by connecting a sandbox hosted in Germany to another in Japan, built in cooperation with NTT Communications. Additionally, the partners will collaborate with Gaia-X to integrate Gaia-X Digital Clearing House Services testing mutual recognition of trust anchors between Europe and Japan. This collaboration will benefit application developers, and data providers and consumers as it significantly streamlines the process of joining, onboarding, and utilizing data ecosystems, such as Catena-X. These activities will be presented at Data Spaces Discovery Day Tokyo 2024 on October 9. This initiative is seen as the first step to accelerate the development and implementation of a multi-regional trusted data infrastructure, not only for Europe and Japan but also for the rest of the world.