Recap Horizon Cloud Summit 2022

On 11 – 12 May 2022, HUB4CLOUD organised the third edition of Horizon Cloud Summit, the flagship event of the HORIZON CLOUD initiative. For the first time since the pandemic, the event took place physically at Cloud Expo Europe, Frankfurt, Germany. The Summit aimed at gathering a diverse community of researchers, policymakers, Cloud innovators, and broadly understood technological initiatives, to continue building the EU’s competitive position in the market. A total of 177 participants attended the event and discussed the future of Cloud Computing in Europe with 23 speakers during 8 inspiring sessions.

DAY 1

The first day of the event, that was moderated by Martel Innovate CIO and HUB4CLOUD coordinator Giovanni Rimassa, kicked-off with an opening keynote presentation held by Ignacio M. Llorente, CEO OpenNebula Systems and Chair Cloud/Edge WG, European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud, on fostering the development of next-generation edge and cloud technologies in Europe. Hereafter, Alberto Palomo, Chief Data Officer of the Spanish Government gave a keynote talk about digital transformation for the purpose of business and societal change.

The event continued then with a Panel on the topic “Cloud-Edge-IoT convergence – challenges and way ahead” moderated by Martel Innovate CTO Federico M. Facca. In this panel, the following five panelists discussed the European cloud-edge-iot landscape and the challenges in the business and technical convergence of these domains:

• Klaus Ottradovetz, VP Global Service Delivery, Atos
• Andreas Weiss, Head of Digital Business Models, eco Association of the Internet Industry; Director EuroCloud Germany
• Gael Blondelle, Vice President, Ecosystem Development, Eclipse Foundation
• Simon Reid, D-Orbit
• Antonis Cassano, Business Development Director, Unisystems

In the “AI for the cloud – how to improve the cloud using AI” that followed afterwards, the following panelists discussed the application of AI in the Cloud, more specifically, how AI can improve the Cloud infrastructure, with moderator Giovanni Rimassa, CIO of Martel Innovate:

• Christoph Buchli, CTO & co-Founder, Helio AG
• Jesus Luna, Cloud Security and Certification Expert, Bosch
• Maria Barros Weiss, VP Research Digital Ecosystems, IONOS

The day ended with an inspiring session introducing success stories, best practises, and use cases from the European Cloud Community. The session was moderated by Juncal Alonso, Senior Researcher, TECNALIA, and the following speakers presented their Cloud innovations:

• Radu Prodan, Professor, University of Klagenfurt, Austria – Presentation: Democratic Video-Opinion Journalism in the Social Continuum

• Alejandro Huertas, Cloud Engineer, OpenNebula Systems – Presentation: OpenNebula’s ONEedge project: bringing an open source edge computing platform to market

DAY 2

After a great first day full of inspiring discussions, the second day of Horizon Cloud Summit, which was moderated by Federico M. Facca, CTO Martel Innovate, started with a Keynote Session by Carla Arend, Senior Program Director: Lead Analyst, Cloud in Europe; IDC, on the Future of European Cloud Services.

Hereafter, moderator Enrique Areizaga, Project Manager / ICT Division, TECNALIA, discussed “Cloud computing skill training needs and opportunities in Europe” with an experts panel consisting of:

• Carla Arend, Senior Program Director: Lead Analyst, Cloud in Europe; IDC, on the Future of European Cloud Services
• Brendan Rowan, Managing Consultant, BluSpecs
• Jos Poortvliet, Director Marketing, Nextcloud

Focusing more on the role of the Cloud in helping businesses adapt to digital transformation,

the Summit then continued with a panel session on “Digital transformation for businesses – pain points for startups and SMEs”. Session moderator Enrique Areizaga Sanchez, Project Manager / ICT Division, TECNALIA, led an interesting discussion among:

• Julian Fischer, CEO, anynines GmbH
• Massimiliano Gori, Canonical
• Mario Büchling, Skaylink
• Enrique Areizaga, CEO and Co-Founder, GPONDoctor SL

Finally, the Summit offered another session on success stories, best practises, and use cases from the European Cloud Community. Moderated by Amrita Prasad, Partnership and Community Expert, Martel Innovate, the following speakers provided interesting insights:

• Juncal Alonso, Senior Researcher, TECNALIA – Presentation: DevOps, IaC and AI: The golden triplet
• Federico Facca, CTO Martel Innovation – Presentation Cloud Computing in Europe – Landscape analysis, adoption challenges and future research and innovation opportunities

The event ended with a plenary session held by Martel Innovate CIO Giovanni Rimassa wrapping up the lessons learned during Horizon Cloud Summit 2022 and discussing the next steps of HORIZON CLOUD.

The HORIZON CLOUD team thanks all speakers and participants for taking part in Horizon Cloud Summit 2022!

Have a look at what our Summit experts say about the evolution of the European Cloud market in the next decade: