Digital Transformation has arrived and currently, it is happening too fast for societies to truly harness the powers of the transformation. In times when the new fuel is data, marketplaces for bringing value to data assets are growing ever popular and data economy models are still under development, many design aspects for the Digital Transformation still needs to be defined.

SMEs and Entrepreneurs are facing the biggest challenge and face major hurdles in comparison with large industries and corporations who traditionally dominate the large data markets. However, Digital Transformation is an opportunity for new ideas, disruptive models and only SME’s and Entrepreneurs are have the speed and agility to adopt and adapt new business models, in relation to how large industries. function. In a workshop at the European Big Data Value Forum, the i3-MARKET partners explored how data and data marketplaces can be opened up to European SME and Entrepreneurs through the use of new technologies.

The workshop began with Project Coordinator Dr Martin Serrano identifying the trends that are powering the digital transformation and the benefits of greater digitalisation, such as:

1. Data-driven, analytics based customer experience is a priority
2. Emergence of new online business models will drive growth
3. A strong focus on resilient supply chains leveraging analytics
4. The growth of a flexible work culture will drive benefits for both employees and employers
5. Remote talent management will be a key requirement
6. Providers will focus on building 5G infrastructure
7. Cybersecurity will remain a top priority
8. AI as a complementary technology for diverse use cases
9. The cloud and IoT will be common infrastructures
10. Blockchain will increasingly be considered as a mainstream technology

Data will be a driver of many of these processes, and for Europe, and European SMEs to be able to harness these trends, data marketplaces will need to become enablers of data sharing and exchanges, across multiple domains.

To do so, backend technologies are needed that facilitate the connection between marketplaces and allow easier access for SMEs, that may not have the capacity to find relevant data or ensure that it is in a useable format for their systems.

 Ivan Martinez Rodriguez, of ATOS, and Marcio Mateus further developed this idea, explaining how tools to allow for federation of data marketplaces and exchanges would help marketplaces to co-exist. Ivan introduced the i3-MARKET backplane as a specific tool that allows data marketplaces to interact with eachother, following a data-centric approach.

Alessandro Amicone, of GFT further explained how the backplane would work, and how i3-MARKET has implemented and SNK-RI to facilitate the use of the service, so that SMEs can take advantage of multiple data services without having to learn and operate the different technologies and interfaces that they run on. For more information on this, and to view the building blocks of the i3-MARKET backplane, you can go to the Open Source i3-MARKET website .