75% Data Problem, €250 Billion Opportunity, NEO8ra Solution — Fog
Wednesday 7 October — Art of Trade · 8ra / IPCEI-CIS
The table
The case
Subtitle: A leadership case grounded in public sources and the author’s three-year involvement. NEO8ra is a fictional project; the customer scenario is illustrative; the panel’s decisions remain open. Source: The owner's own case (Dražen Kapusta, 2026-09-13), verbatim — the eight questions are his; on his word the project is the fictional NEO8ra throughout and the other firms are removed
Three Years into the Answer
Preparing the general asambly discussion, Prof Drago returns to a problem he has lived with for three years.
Europe needs greater control over its digital infrastructure. European companies possess valuable technologies, engineering talent, computing resources and industrial relationships. A major collaborative initiative is building the connections between them.
Yet one question remains difficult to answer:
What can a European customer buy, from whom, with what assurance that the whole service will work?
For someone helping build the answer, this is personal. Three years represent engineering effort, relationships, travel, negotiations and opportunities postponed while waiting for other pieces to connect.
His earlier case, The Fog of Federation, captures the tension: strategic clarity can coexist with uncertainty about execution.
At CDayZ, the intention is to bring representatives of the NEO8ra ecosystem into the room and ask them to help resolve it.
The opportunity is large enough to deserve ambition. The work already invested deserves a route to market.
The Data Problem Behind the Headline
The headline’s 75% opens a necessary distinction. The European Commission identifies a 2030 objective of 75% of European businesses using cloud-edge technologies. That is an adoption target, not a measurement of European data controlled abroad. Separately, NEO8ra’s published analysis describes the three major American cloud providers as accounting for over 70% of Europe’s cloud market. European Commission
Together, these figures frame a consequential question: as more European businesses digitalise, whose capabilities and services will they depend on?
Consider an illustrative manufacturing group introducing AI across its factories. It wants to analyse faults, retrieve engineering knowledge and coordinate suppliers. Its commercial information includes production methods, prices and customer commitments.
The group needs reliable performance, controlled access and affordable operation. It also needs to understand what happens if a provider changes its terms, withdraws a service or becomes unsuitable.
Its management cannot postpone modernisation indefinitely. A European alternative must make adoption practical.
The €250 Billion Opportunity
An April 2025 Asterès study commissioned by Cigref estimated European business spending on software and cloud services at €400 billion annually. It attributed €330 billion to purchases from American companies and estimated that €264 billion directly benefited the American economy. Cigref / Asterès
The title’s €250 billion expresses that order of magnitude.
It represents an opportunity to build European supply, retain more economic activity and strengthen the capacity to reinvest. Recovering it would require competitive services, customers willing to switch and sustained execution. Spending redirected is not automatically additional GDP or profit.
But even a meaningful share could support businesses, skilled employment and further innovation.
For the manufacturing group, the continental argument becomes a purchasing decision: can European partners offer something valuable enough to justify the cost and effort of adoption?
The Solution Europe Is Building
The NEO8ra initiative’s proposed answer is a multi-provider cloud-edge continuum: infrastructure from different providers connected through open standards, enabling services to operate across cloud and local computing environments. Its published vision combines data, operational and technological sovereignty.
There is tangible work behind that ambition.
NEO8ra has established a testbed combining resources from eight partners across six EU countries. Its current project page also reports a federation demonstration spanning ten availability zones in eight countries, using resources from five European providers. These are documented technical milestones for the panel to examine and build upon.
Within this case, NEO8ra is a fictional project: it names the author’s proposed direction for connecting NEO capabilities with that broader European infrastructure effort. It does not imply that every integration or commercial arrangement has already been agreed.
The intended contribution is practical: help independent providers coordinate delivery, establish evidence of what happened and reconcile obligations between them.
For the customer, the desired result is a service that works across organisations without requiring the customer to manage every relationship separately.
Where the Fog Appears
The fog lies between available components and dependable collective delivery.
A technology team can demonstrate its component while still needing another partner’s integration. An infrastructure provider can offer capacity while requiring demand commitments before reserving it. A customer can express interest while needing a price, service commitment and accountable supplier before approving expenditure.
Each position can be reasonable.
The harder tensions concern incentives. A large company must protect current revenue while investing in a new offering. A specialist needs access to customers without losing its commercial identity. A publicly supported project must satisfy its programme obligations while developing something customers will continue buying.
These are hypotheses for the panel to test against its experience.
Which dependencies are genuinely technical? Which decisions lack an owner? Which commercial interests remain unresolved? Where has progress already cleared the fog?
The answers may differ across projects.
Put a Customer inside the Architecture
Return to the manufacturing group.
Its first proposed workload is an AI assistant using approved maintenance documents and machine records. Local processing could serve sensitive or time-critical tasks; shared infrastructure could support additional computing needs.
AI could help technicians find relevant incidents faster. Engineers would still need to verify document versions, equipment compatibility and recommendations before intervention.
Now the partnership faces concrete questions. Who integrates the factory systems? Who supports the night shift? Who investigates an incorrect answer? Who pays for spare capacity? Can the service move to another provider without losing permissions or essential functionality?
A successful demonstration would establish something valuable. A repeatable commercial service would require further commitments.
The panel must identify that distance and decide how to cover it.
A Room Capable of Moving Forward
COTRUGLI’s contribution is to bring builders and potential buyers into a setting where they can work on the same problem.
The tribe’s shared learning, travel, meals and celebrations create opportunities to know people beyond their formal positions. Humor can make an uncomfortable admission easier. Familiarity can make a request for help possible.
At CDayZ, that trust should support a candid working session: a provider showing what is ready, a buyer explaining what prevents purchase, and a partner naming the dependency it cannot resolve alone.
The decision left to the room is whether a group can take responsibility for a specific offer now—or whether a prerequisite must first be settled, with a named owner and a clear consequence if it remains unresolved.
The CDayZ Leadership Challenge
Turn the fog into a shared account of reality and a credible route to delivery.
Representatives of the NEO8ra ecosystem, NEO builders and prospective customers should identify one valuable offering, distinguish demonstrated capabilities from missing elements, and agree who can resolve the decisive blockers.
Discussion Questions
The owner's "Eight Questions for the Room":
- What can a customer actually buy today?
- Where does European control materially improve the offer?
- Which three blockers most constrain delivery?
- Whose incentives must change for collaboration to accelerate?
- Where could NEO capabilities make a useful contribution?
- Which customer and workload offer the strongest starting point?
- How much of the €250 billion opportunity is realistically addressable?
- What will participants commit to after CDayZ?
Identify available services, delivery conditions and the supplier accountable for the whole.
Explain the customer value of access control, operational continuity, portability and choice.
Rank technical, commercial, organisational or funding obstacles using concrete examples.
Address revenue sharing, customer ownership, intellectual property and competing commitments.
Identify a specific coordination, evidence or settlement problem and the integration needed.
Select a buyer with a meaningful need, resources and willingness to participate.
Define the market segment, adoption assumptions and European value created without double counting.
Name the decision, responsible organisations, resources and evidence that would demonstrate progress.
A Lesson for the Next COTRUGLI Generation
Leadership in a federation means building shared action among organisations you do not control. It requires understanding their incentives, making dependencies visible and creating commitments worth keeping.
Europe’s opportunity is substantial. The next generation’s task is to turn collective capability into something a customer can confidently use—and partners can sustainably deliver.
Your comment on this chapter
A question for the table, a disagreement, what you would have done. The case lead reads every comment; the ones the table takes up enter the chapter as questions from the room, with your name.