eu-LISA, European Agency for the operational management for large-scale IT systems in areas of freedom and security, held an industry roundtable in Strasbourg that explored the potential architectures for interoperable systems including Blockchain technology.

The roundtable event ‘A single search portal and shared BMS for Europe: Moving forward with concrete implementation’ was held on June 8th that saw over 50 participants from the industry. The event discussed various concepts of interoperability that were introduced by the European Commission in 2016, considered by expert group on Information Systems and Interoperability for the past year. This is presently being studied by the Agency as well as its stakeholders in a move to implement in the upcoming years.

“It is evident that industry will have to support the Agency in its efforts on interoperability planned for the coming months and years. The event provided an initial impetus to such interaction and represented another effort by the Agency to engage this important sector in a fair and transparent manner. We are grateful to the large number of interested staff who participated, supported discussions and contributed to the successful delivery of this event,” the event release stated.

The roundtable event saw Accenture, SAP, Guardtime, Augmentiq and SAS that provided various interesting inputs in their presentations that related to interoperability implementation including blockchain technology as well as questions of data quality and analytics.

Also, eu-LISA, EASO and the EC DG HOME offered presentations on the state of current planning around interoperability, the Agency study on common ABIS, potential benefits and advantages of interoperability, among others.