Straight after the AIOTI Days in Florence, CEI-Sphere moved south for INSIDE Connect 2026, held on 30 September and 1 October at the Circolo Ufficiali in Palermo. Now in its second edition after Málaga last year, the event is the flagship gathering of the INSIDE Industry Association, a CEI-Sphere partner and a membership organisation of more than 280 members from 28 countries covering the full electronic components, software and systems value chain.
The two days worked as a roadmapping forum, with sessions on the next EU framework programme, the global semiconductor shift, RISC-V and next generation European chips, software-defined mobility, trustworthy cyber-physical systems and open ECS architectures. CEI-Sphere had its own track on the morning of day two.
The deep dive: edge to cloud in industrial optimisation and productivity
Paolo Azzoni (INSIDE and Eurotech) opened with an introduction to CEI-Sphere and where the project stands as it heads into its final stretch, before handing over to the two substantive contributions.
Antonio Kung (Trialog) presented the Hourglass Model 2027, this time framed specifically as a business canvas. The updated version of the model maps stakeholders and capabilities across the layers of a CEI ecosystem and locates the narrow centre where interoperability, open standards and governance make collaboration at scale possible. Presenting it as a canvas shifts the emphasis from describing an ecosystem to working out where value sits inside it, which is a useful move for an audience of industrial actors.
Mauro Tortonesi then presented the analysis behind the Stand-up 3 questionnaire, the consultation run within the industrial and productivity sphere. Fifty responses came back, which took a considerable amount of work to collect and to make sense of, and the findings are already shaping how the project thinks about edge to cloud deployment in industrial settings.
The track closed with an open discussion and a first set of preliminary recommendations, with participants bringing their own experience of moving industrial workloads across the cloud, edge and IoT continuum.
A recurring theme
Coming from a different community and a different agenda, the discussion in Palermo converged on much the same conclusion reached in Florence a day earlier. Europe has the technology, the talent and the research base. What it lacks is a clear strategy and a way of pulling fragmented ecosystems together, and that gap, rather than any technical obstacle, is what keeps holding deployment back.
Our thanks to INSIDE for hosting, and to everyone who joined the session and the conversations around it. More on the project and the Hourglass Model 2027 is available on our website.