Exchanging a certificate through Catena-X is only the first step. For automotive suppliers managing growing certificate portfolios, the real work lies in maintaining certificates across sites and business partners, monitoring expiry dates, tracking what has been published and acting on OEM responses. Connect & Integrate from T-Systems is evolving from a certificate exchange solution into an enterprise-ready certificate control system: a central cockpit for inventory and lifecycle activities, dedicated certificate and site views, a consolidated view of partner responses, site information drawn from Cofinity-X, and detailed technical logs when auditing is required. Combined with AI-assisted preparation already in production across hundreds of customers, it creates one connected journey from preparing certificate data to controlling what happens across the entire certificate lifecycle.

When VMware deprecated and archived Kubeapps, the open-source Helm application manager embedded in T-Systems Build & Operate, we had a choice: stay on unsupported software or find something better. We chose Devtron, an open-source Kubernetes management platform that gives dataspace operators one control plane for application delivery, infrastructure, security and observability. This article explains why Kubeapps reached the end of its life, what Devtron brings to the Build & Operate operation toolkit, and how the transition runs in two phases without interrupting a single running service.

Connect & Integrate brings the T-Systems AI power within the solution to support organizations scale up and become efficient in their business workflows within Catena-X. The cross-use-case AI layer sits at the intersection of data preparation and exchange as a business enabler directly within the workflows.

The IDSA position paper "Data Spaces and AI" argues that the coordination problems facing agentic AI — identity, trust, access control, governance and provenance across organizational boundaries — are the same ones dataspaces already solve for cross-company data sharing. Rather than reinventing them for autonomous agents, the peer-to-peer logic behind standards like ISO/IEC 20151 can transfer directly to agent-to-agent interaction. T-Systems contributes a concrete proof point: RoX, a German consortium where competing robotics players and institutes such as DFKI and DLR share a sovereign data foundation for AI-based robotics. Built on Tractus-X and aligned with IDSA and Gaia-X, it already powers live robotic cells and is now extending that governed data supply to an agentic layer — showing in practice what the paper argues in principle.

In November 2025, the first peer-to-peer dataspace transaction between Korea and Europe was completed, with L&F (Korea) sharing product carbon footprint data with the automotive division of a major European Tier 1. Orchestrated by Prof. Chaisung Lim of Konkuk University and enabled by T-Systems' Dataspace-as-a-Service, the exchange ran on the Eclipse Tractus-X stack with the IDSA protocol and Gaia-X trust framework — the same standards underpinning Catena-X. The transaction proves that sovereign, governed data sharing can now travel across regions and regulatory environments without centralising data or surrendering control. Beyond secure, trusted file transfer, it points to a strategic foundation for AI-ready data and new value-creation scenarios, including controlled collaboration across ecosystems and even between competitors.