Digitalisation offers the opportunity to make business processes more efficient. In an eco-member interview, Andreas Kupper reports on how Kupper IT harnesses this potential to enhance the value chain.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen today delivered a State of the Union speech, highlighting that Europe must be a pioneer in AI and stand for transparent, ethical development. eco Chair of the Board Oliver Süme is of the opinion that the Commission President focused too excessively on the potential dangers of AI and digital technologies.

For the second time, the leading minds of the Gaia-X scene met in Berlin on 5 and 6 September 2023 for GXFS Connect. While in 2022 the focus was still on the idea behind the initiative and the start of the German funded projects, this year more than 40 speakers discussed concrete progress in the development of a European data ecosystem.

In the run-up to the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, we interviewed Giovanni Coppa, eco Competence Group Leader Mobility and Head of Data Center and Cloud Innovation at WOBCOM GmbH, about his expectations for the trade fair, and his take on current and future challenges in the field of Smart City and Smart Mobility.

We spoke to Dr. Michael Lipka, Senior Manager Technology Strategy, Huawei Technologies Germany, about the crucial role of digital infrastructures and wireless technologies for Smart Home use cases. On 12 September 2023, the eco Networks and IoT Competence Groups  will meet at the Huawei OpenLab in Ismaning to discuss groundbreaking topics of current and future Smart Home applications under the motto "Digital Infrastructure as the Basis of Smart Home Applications" (a German-language event).

Following the long-awaited ruling by the European Court of Justice on 22 September last year, which stated that the German regulations on data retention are incompatible with EU law, the German Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig has now also issued its verdict. eco Chair of the Board Oliver Süme calls on the German federal government on the occasion of the ruling: “The German federal government should now finally seize the opportunity to set a political course and initiate the repeal of data retention.”

How do you become future-proof as an employer? On 23 August 2023, the New Work Competence Group discovered solutions to this question at the summer event in the Microsoft office in Cologne.

Digital services and technologies are the driving thrust for the transport turnaround. 45.4 per cent of Germans attribute a decisive role to digital mobility services in shaping the traffic turnaround. The respondents place great hope above all in artificial intelligence and thus intelligent traffic management.

The German Federal Ministry of the Interior aims to strengthen the resilience of critical infrastructures with the KRITIS Umbrella Act, which is currently being coordinated between government departments. For the first time, this act seeks to establish the nationwide uniform regulations for the physical protection of critical facilities, which are to be implemented in German law as a result of the European CER Directive.