SAP
Building the Product Foundation for Europe's Sovereign AI Cloud
Shaped SAP's ApeiroRA Portal into a steadier product foundation for Europe's sovereign AI cloud, stabilizing alpha delivery, aligning a broad IPCEI-CIS stakeholder landscape, and establishing AI-first development practices.
- Client
- SAP
- Sector
- Enterprise software
- Engagement
- 2025 - 2026
Context
The engagement landscape
Shaped SAP's ApeiroRA Portal into a steadier product foundation for Europe's sovereign AI cloud, stabilizing alpha delivery, aligning a broad IPCEI-CIS stakeholder landscape, and establishing AI-first development practices.
Challenge
What needed to change
ApeiroRA sat at the intersection of IPCEI-CIS, open-source cloud-edge orchestration, and sovereign AI infrastructure. The wider initiative spanned around 120 projects and more than 100 companies and research organisations, but the portal itself was still a fragile alpha with shifting requirements, unstable edge APIs, and no durable product direction.
Intervention
How EnCoCo responded
EnCoCo defined the product identity around sovereignty, interoperability, and open innovation; brought the relevant engineering, research, and policy stakeholders together around clearer expectations; and established an AI-first way of working that made the delivery pipeline steadier and faster under constant change.
AI-first delivery ramp
Completed work accelerated once AI-first practices took hold
A delivery snapshot from the adoption period: the team absorbed more active scope while completed work rose sharply after EnCoCo established AI-first development practices.
Enabled team with AI-first practices
AI-first
The completion curve steepened quickly once the team adopted AI-first delivery, even while the active backlog continued to grow.
Pull quote
“The portal needed more than a backlog. It needed a product identity, a stable cadence, and an AI-first way of building across a fragmented stakeholder landscape.”
Story
How the work unfolded
Starting point
At SAP, EnCoCo stepped into the ApeiroRA Portal when Europe’s IPCEI-CIS ambition was clear but the product foundation was still fragile. The portal had to unify cloud and edge orchestration, support sovereign AI infrastructure, and fit into a broader IPCEI-CIS ecosystem spanning around 120 projects and more than 100 companies and research organisations across Europe.
The reality on the ground was unstable. ApeiroRA was still an early alpha, requirements shifted constantly, edge-node APIs changed without notice, and the product lacked a durable identity that could survive the pressure from policy, research, and engineering demands.
How EnCoCo responded
EnCoCo defined that identity around digital sovereignty, interoperability, and open innovation. They translated strategic goals into a modular product direction, brought the relevant architects, researchers, policymakers, and developers together around clearer expectations, and turned a fragmented set of demands into something teams could actually build against.
Delivery also needed a better operating model. EnCoCo established a steadier cadence and introduced AI-first development practices that helped the team move faster without losing control of the roadmap. As the graph on this page shows, completed work accelerated sharply once those practices were in place, even while the active scope continued to grow.
What changed
The result was a more coherent, user-centric cloud-edge interface positioned for Europe’s sovereign AI ambitions. The portal moved from fragile alpha work toward a more stable product pipeline, while open-source collaboration and NVIDIA-backed infrastructure integration gave the initiative a stronger technical foundation.