In today’s interconnected business landscape, exchanging company certificates is a necessary step in establishing trust between organizations. Whether it’s verifying identity, signing transactions, or onboarding suppliers, certificates form the backbone of secure communication. Yet, the way certificates are currently exchanged is anything but efficient.
Imagine this: if a company works with 100 business partners, it may need to provide its company certificate in 100 different formats and maintain them at 100 different integration points. This fragmentation leads to high operational effort, increased risk of errors, and a lack of consistent governance.
A new standard for certificate exchange in Catena-X
To solve this challenge, the Catena-X ecosystem has introduced a standardized but flexible data model for company certificates. This enables companies to provide and exchange their certificates as digital assets within the Catena-X dataspace using the Eclipse Data Space Connector (EDC).
By following this standard, participants benefit from:
- A common semantic model that ensures interoperability
- Secure, reliable exchange of certificates
- Simplified management across diverse business relationships
- Enhanced data sovereignty and compliance
This approach allows companies to publish their certificates once, in a standardized format, and make them available to any authorized partner in the network—no more duplicating efforts for every single customer.
What’s new in the standard?
The latest update of the standard brings enhancements to the semantic data model, making it more robust and usable across industries. Key improvements include:
- Additional metadata about the physical document (e.g. certificate attributes)
- A now mandatory issuer name field, improving transparency and traceability
- Alignment with the Catena-X dataspace architecture, supporting smooth integration with other components and services
This evolution strengthens the usability of certificates not only in the automotive industry but also in adjacent sectors looking to adopt federated data-sharing principles.
Who is this for?
This standard is designed for multiple stakeholder roles in the Catena-X ecosystem:
- Data Providers and Consumers who exchange certificates as part of business interactions
- Business Application Providers who want to build or integrate certificate management features
- Enablement Service Providers offering infrastructure and tools to support certificate exchange
For all these roles, the standard offers a path to streamlined, secure, and scalable certificate management.
T-Systems' Connect & Integrate: Enabling secure certificate exchange at scale
As a trusted digital partner in the Catena-X network, T-Systems supports this use case by offering end-to-end capabilities that enable organizations to adopt and implement the new certificate standard effortlessly.
Here’s how T-Systems' Connect & Integrate leads the way:
- Onboarding & Integrating Support enabling entry and deployment into Catena-X within minutes with no technical manual configurations and no IT know-how required. Ideal for suppliers, OEM, or platform providers.
- Flexible business user-friendly UI and quick deployment within Catena-X
- Easy certificate upload with drag and drop or connect your preferred cloud storage
- Standards-Compliant Infrastructure provides secure, scalable infrastructure and encryption aligned with the latest version of the Catena-X standards (CX – 0135) —ensuring full compatibility with Catena-X components and network.
- Convenient download locally or transfer to preferred storage within seconds
- Certification lifecycle services to ensure validation, revocation, reminders, alerting and more for your certification expiry date, to allow timely renewals and avoid business disruptions
- Flexible policy adaption to allow easy adaptability for existing offers and increase efficiency
- Transparent pricing logic to avoid any last-minute billing surprises for certificate exchange use-case
The road ahead
As the Catena-X network grows, the ability to trust and verify identities across companies and systems will be critical to its success. The standardized certificate exchange model marks a significant step forward in making that possible.
With T-Systems' Connect & Integrate, companies can now participate in the network with confidence—knowing that their certificates are securely managed, easily exchangeable, and Catena-X standards-compliant.
If your organization is looking to reduce the complexity of certificate management and embrace the future of trusted digital collaboration, now is the time to adopt the Catena-X certificate standard—and we here to help you make that transition seamless.
Contact us today and get Catena-X ready.
