Programme Category
Programme Name
Programme Description
Digital Europe Programme is the first EU programme that aims to accelerate the recovery and drive the digital transformation of Europe.
Worth €7.6 billion (in current prices), the Programme is a part of the next long-term EU budget, (the Multiannual Financial Framework), and it covers 2021 to 2027. It will provide funding for projects in five crucial areas: supercomputing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, advanced digital skills, and ensuring the wide use of digital technologies across the economy and society.
The Programme is fine-tuned to fill the gap between the research of digital technologies and their deployment, and to bring the results of research to the market – for the benefit of Europe’s citizens and businesses, and in particular SMEs. Investments under the Digital Europe programme supports the Union’s twin objectives of a green transition and digital transformation and strengthens the Union’s resilience and strategic autonomy.
Identifier Code
Call
Summary
Large-scale pilot projects will be launched aiming at the deployment at scale of innovative, sustainable, secure and cross-border cloud-to-edge based services applied in a set of well-chosen application sectors. These deployments will serve the double objective of, first, being the first actual concrete implementations and deployments of the middleware platform and its different open source middleware solutions serving the needs of a specific application sector and use case and the gained experience should feedback into this separate process. Diversity, both in geography and use cases, of the retained large scale pilot projects will therefore be key in testing the versatility and robustness of the platform. The second objective is to deploy additional cloud-to-edge services that are particularly innovative and/or not (yet) of enough general interest to be procured for the common good.
Detailed Call Description
The projects consist of the large-scale rollout of several of the following advanced ‘cloud-to-edge’ services across the EU:
- Edge cybersecurity services, notably for shared edge resources;
- Highly secured, low latency local edge services running on green infrastructures that enable federated Artifical Intelligence and;
- Ultra-secure and ethical standards compliant data management such as through scalable blockchain based services.
- Predictive analytics and data visualisation services;
- Edge-cloud native multi-tenancy
This list of services should not be seen as closed.
The retained projects need to ensure that:
- they are built over the cloud-to-edge middleware platform.
- they are hybrid, i.e. that they truly cover at least cloud and edge computing and, where possible, more (far-edge or High Performance Computing);
- they track their environmental performance, with a view to allowing an energy-efficient and sustainable data management;
- they are accompanied by an appropriate monitoring system to measure the uptake of cloud-to-edge based services and their associated data flows;
- they coordinate among them and with the Alliance for industrial data, edge and cloud, the European data spaces, the Data Space Support Centre to ensure, through a common reference governance framework, the reuse by other actors of the federated cloud-to-edge based services they develop;
In selecting the pilot projects, the Commission will adopt a portfolio approach, trying to maximise:
- Different use cases in the public sector or of general public interest. Taken together, the retained project portfolio should ideally address the health sector, the mobility sector (in particular the 5G corridors supported under the Connecting Europe Facility 2 programme), the common data spaces supported under public administrations, and smart cities and communities;
- Different geographies, i.e. deployments that cover at least three Member States (and ideally many more), while keeping in mind that some use cases can be very local;
- Different services, i.e. deployments that address several of the services described above.
Call Total Budget
Financing percentage by EU or other bodies / Level of Subsidy or Loan
Project budget (maximum grant amount): between €8 million and €10 million per project
The grant will be a budget-based mixed actual cost grant (actual costs, with unit cost and flat-rate elements). This means that it will reimburse ONLY certain types of costs (eligible costs) and costs that were actually incurred for your project (NOT the budgeted costs).
After grant signature, you will normally receive a prefinancing to start working on the project (float of normally 50% of the maximum grant amount; exceptionally less or no prefinancing). The prefinancing will be paid 30 days from entry into force/10 days before starting date/financial guarantee (if required) – whichever is the latest.
Thematic Category Notes
The Commission will consider how much the deployments:
- involve Small and Medium-size Enterprises;
- contribute, in line with the objective of the Green Deal, to a climate neutral, energy-efficient and sustainable cloud-to-edge service offering, and contribute to the greening of the computing industry while enabling the green transition of other sectors.
Thematic Categories
- Energy
- Environment and Climate Change
- Research, Technological Development and Innovation
Eligibility for Participation
- Private Bodies
- Researchers/Research Centers/Institutions
- Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)
- State-owned Enterprises
Eligibility For Participation Notes
In order to be eligible, the applicants (beneficiaries and affiliated entities) must:
- be legal entities (public or private bodies)
- be established in one of the eligible countries, i.e.:
- EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories (OCTs)
- non-EU countries (except for topics with restrictions; see below):
- listed EEA countries and countries associated to the Digital Europe Programme or countries which are in ongoing negotiations for an association agreement and where the agreement enters into force before grant signature (together ‘DEP associated countries’, see list of participating countries)
Proposals must be submitted by: minimum 3 independent applicants (beneficiaries; not affiliated entities) from 3 different eligible countries
Call Opening Date
Call Closing Date
National Contact Point(s)
Eleana Gabriel
Directorate of Research and Innovation
Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy
Telephone: +357 22 691918
Email: egabriel@dmrid.gov.cy
(Publish Date: 26/09/2022-for internal use only)
EU Contact Point
For questions please contact: