Chris S. Langdon

Catena-X, the open data ecosystem in the automotive sector, made a significant impact at the 2023 CESMII Annual Member Meeting. Collaborating with CESMII, Catena-X showcased its innovative approach to smart manufacturing, focusing on regulatory compliance, data-driven super-apps, and decentralized technology. The Catena-X Association's dialogue with CESMII led to discussions about expanding their open-source software core in the U.S. The joint exploration of a C-X Hub U.S. with CESMII marked a successful step in accelerating Catena-X's activities in the U.S., as reflected in their recent engagements and presentations.

Discover the International Manufacturing-X (IM-X) Council, unveiled at the 2023 CESMII Annual Member Meeting, fostering a global collaborative data ecosystem for smart manufacturing. The U.S. and Germany lead the initiative, aligning digital twins and software applications. Dive into Manufacturing-X's inception, the IM-X workshop, and insights on collaborative projects like Catena-X.

The 2023 edition of the “Internationale Automobil Ausstellung” or International Motor Show, known as IAA Mobility, made its return to Munich, marking the event's second presence in the city. This iteration of IAA underscored a significant shift from conventional automotive paradigms to a comprehensive array of mobility solutions. This multi-polar perspective evolved as a theme throught the event.

In August 2023 Google Cloud opened a new region in Berlin-Brandenburg, the second region in Germany, and its 12th in Europe (Welt 2023). The new region serves Google Cloud customers with local cloud capacity to scale their workloads and satisfy important in-country disaster recovery requirements. It is part of Google Cloud’s global network of 38 regions and 115 zones that bring cloud services to over 200 countries and territories worldwide: “The opening of the Berlin-Brandenburg region is great news for our joint solution with Google, as well as for Europe’s digital sovereignty. Our unique proposition brings together European values for data and the innovative potential of Google’s global network – and is growing it with a new cloud region,” Adel Al-Saleh, Member of the Deutsche Telekom Board of Management and CEO of T-Systems (Wagner 2023).

Hub.Berlin is a prominent annual technology and innovation conference held in Berlin, Germany, at Station Berlin near Gleisdreieck, a historically significant railway hub in the center of Berlin. The event is organized by Bitkom, Germany's digital association with more than 2,200 member companies of the digital economy (Bitkom, link), and serves as a platform where professionals, entrepreneurs, and investors come together to explore the latest trends, ideas, and advancements in tech and digital transformation. This year saw politicians like Dr. Volker Wissing, German Federal Minister of Digital and Transport, CEOs like Tim Hoettges of Deutsche Telekom, Adel Al-Saleh, Deutsche Telekom board member and CEO of Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems subsidiary, and entrepreneurs like Jonas Andrulis, CEO & Founder of AIeph Alpha, a successful German artificial intelligence start up.

In the era of data-driven value creation, dataspaces offer the solution to unlocking the true value of data. The Telekom Data Intelligence Hub connects leading businesses to each other while ensuring that the respective cloud environments will function with its dataspace technologies. This means that existing systems do not have to be replaced, while new innovative potential can be released.

The Telekom Data Intelligence Hub team shared its experience in dataspace implementations from various Gaia-X lighthouse projects including Catena-X and Gaia-X 4 Future Mobility with a group of leading innovators and decision makers in Bitkom’s Working Group on Big Data & Advanced Analytics. DIH presented a 3-step recipe and illustrated it using the RealLab Hamburg case stud about a first intermodal travel super-app. This project was awarded the “Innovation Lab Award” of the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action in 2022 and has emerged as a blueprint for data-driven innovation in mobility.

Our thinking on data issues of management importance in refereed publications that go deeper than our short stories. Dataspace solves today's data and data analytics productivity problem. Dataspace .,, is a shift from Big Data (high cost) to Better Data (higher returns) - providing the right data with relevant information content and quality (think: food labels for ingredients and nutritional value), and all in the right quantity is peer-to-peer data communications network - not storage - and with data sovereignty protection so that you can exchange data and maintain control of the rights to your data at all times

Automotive is evolving and merging into a larger mobility sector due to climate regulation on the one hand, and new digital capabilities with software (see SW-defined car) and data as its fuel (see dataspace) on the other hand.