Category: Partner Interview

1. How do you view your company’s/organisation’s role in i3-MARKET?

ATOS is part of i3-Market because we want to connect data marketplaces all over Europe and start exploring new collaborations and partnerships, by taking part of the i3-market backplane as a model for data federation for cross-sectorial data industries. ATOS is aiming to contribute towards the promotion of the Data Economy and data markets, and to stay positioned with AGORA as a reference data marketplace to trade-off Automotive and Mobility data.

2. Why do you participate in the project? How can i3-MARKET have a long-term impact on your work?

There are several ways that i3-MARKET can create a positive impact for ATOS Research and Innovation. However, one of the most promising ways is the i3-MARKET backplane, as ATOS will explore the possibility to use this approach to connect different initiatives around data-driven platforms. The AGORA data marketplace is in fact one such example, but we also have other vertical platforms for data sharing such as DataPass (from the BodyPass project) enabling data exchange between the health and consumer goods sectors, FUSE for energy data, MASAI for manufacturing or UDP for city or infrastructures data management, among others. We plan to investigate throughout the project whether the i3-MARKET backplane approach could be used as backbone to interconnect these platforms.

3. What do you think will be the main benefits of the i3-MARKET to the end-users?

There are several stakeholders who can benefit from i3-MARKET deployment. For instance, Data Consumers who are currently connected with one of existing vertical data marketplaces can gain access through a seamless, secure, and trustworthy way to data sources from industries that aren’t present in AGORA, Siemens or IBM data marketplaces. In this case, a Data Consumer from AGORA can retrieve data from the Siemens or IBM data marketplace by using the i3-MARKET backplane as a middleware platform to interconnect Data Consumers, and Providers all over Europe. It means a huge opportunity for the cross-selling opportunities of those vertical data markets to also provide added-value services to new Data Consumers.

Then, from the Data Provider side, our network partners may currently only trust in one data marketplace to handle their data exchanges, which creates a significant barrier to use other data marketplace providers. In this case, the i3-MARKET backplane can serve as a unique solution as an open source interface to enable data trade-offs and exchange operations among different data marketplace operators. Therefore, each i3-MARKET data marketplace can make it possible for Data Providers to connect to new channels, customer segments and early adopters of the other potential Data customers that had previously been out of reach.

4. In your opinion, what’s the most exciting and inspiring thing about the i3-MARKET?

Finally, i3-market is addressing one major challenge for data-driven industries which is how to enable data exchange among several data platforms providers, marketplaces, data lakes, warehouses, etc. in a common standard language. Therefore, data interoperability should be provided by design to enable the communication among the different providers, sources, types of data, etc. which should be semantically agreed when actors subscribe to data exchange contracts. It would remove the brand-dependant characteristics of the data sources stored in each data marketplace of the project to foster the creation of data-driven services from specially SMEs, and start-ups aiming to ingest data to create new algorithms, data-driven uses cases, or machine learning models for improve maintenance operations, as a examples of possible services which use data as a key resource.