T-Systems and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced on 5 June, 2023, at the North American Catena-X event in Austin that the two companies have teamed up to provide the first dataspace sandbox development environment based on open-source software from the Eclipse Foundation and Gaia-X. This engagement will help create a dataspace development environment for the automotive industry to support the expansion of dataspaces. It will allow local companies to develop or upgrade existing applications to benefit from better and cross-organisational data in a dataspace system.
For this sandbox, T-Systems will provide its LivingLab product, a dataspace-as-a-service development environment. A dataspace is a data-sharing network, not a storage system. It provides unique protection for data rights so that participants maintain control over their data, which allows for novel data products such as cross-organisational digital twins. These, in turn, make new applications possible, such as carbon footprint tracking and material traceability. To help power the dataspace operationally, AWS will provide its cloud services, like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for the sandbox’s storage and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for high-performance computing needs. This dataspace sandbox development environment will make it easy for companies in North America to develop apps, benefit from dataspace capabilities, and join initiatives.
T-Systems and AWS plan to launch the dataspace sandbox as a prototype in late 2023, with full operations in 2024. This schedule allows companies in North America to catch up quickly, and even develop their own applications, locally.
The Eclipse Foundation provides a mature, scalable and business-friendly environment for open-source software collaboration and innovation, and it is home to important open-source projects, including dataspace components.
Gaia-X is a project focused on the development of a federation of data infrastructure and service providers to provide a framework for data exchange based on common rules and standards, ensuring data protection, privacy and security. It was launched in Europe and has a hub in the U.S.
