7 min read

Participant

The customer-segment archetype for organisations joining a dataspace because a customer, mandate, or regulator requires it, not by choice. They span tier-3 SMEs without an IT team, mid-size firms with heterogeneous infrastructure, and OEMs running their own private cloud; what unites them is that participation has historically required becoming an infrastructure operator, and that is not a role they want.

Who is the customer?

The Participant is an organisation joining a dataspace. They range widely in size and technical depth, from large automotive OEMs with internal platform engineering teams to tier-three suppliers with a handful of employees and no dedicated IT infrastructure. What they share is that they did not arrive here by choice. A Participant joins a dataspace because a major customer required it, because a supply chain mandate enforces it, or because a regulatory deadline makes it unavoidable. The decision to participate is rarely the result of an internal initiative; it is a response to external pressure.

For SMEs in particular, and approximately 85% of the Catena-X supply chain is currently untapped, with cost and complexity as the primary barriers, the Participant is likely a small manufacturer or logistics provider whose digital infrastructure consists of an ERP system, email, and a shared file drive. They do not have a platform engineer. They may not have an IT team in any meaningful sense. The person tasked with handling the dataspace onboarding requirement is likely a factory manager, an operations lead, or whoever at the company is least afraid of the computer.

For larger enterprises the picture changes: an internal IT team exists, there may be prior experience with API integrations, and the requirement lands on a team with some technical context. But even here, the Participant’s goal is not to operate infrastructure. It is to satisfy the requirement and move on.

What is their problem?

The Participant’s problem is not, fundamentally, a technical one. It is that participating in a dataspace has required becoming an infrastructure operator, and that is not a role they have any interest in filling. Running a production-grade connector environment on standard cloud infrastructure costs upwards of €300 per month in infrastructure alone, before accounting for the engineering time to build and maintain it. For a supplier that needs to exchange a limited set of supply chain data items per week to satisfy a mandate, that cost is not viable. The barrier is not reluctance to participate, the mandate takes care of that, it is the absence of a price point and an experience level that makes participation rational.

Even for organisations with the technical capacity to self-host, the operational burden persists long after initial deployment. Certificate lifecycles need managing. Credential updates arrive when upstream dataspace specifications change. Kubernetes clusters require maintenance. For an organisation whose core business is manufacturing components or moving freight, none of this is a reasonable ongoing obligation.

The SME also faces a trust problem. Sovereign data infrastructure, by name and by design, sounds like something that requires deep technical scrutiny before you commit to it. An SME supplier told they need to exchange data through an EDC Connector has likely never heard of the Eclipse Dataspace Components project, and they should not need to. The onboarding experience needs to feel safe, clear, and fast, not like a technical procurement decision with a long evaluation cycle.

What is the most important customer benefit?

Participation without operational burden. The Participant can join a dataspace, establish their digital identity, obtain the credentials required by the target dataspace, and begin exchanging data, without running any infrastructure themselves. The platform handles identity establishment, credential issuance, and connector provisioning automatically. From the Participant’s perspective, the interaction should feel closer to signing up for a SaaS tool than deploying a data infrastructure component.

For SMEs specifically, the shared-tier pricing is the enabling condition for the rest of the benefit. At a price point that fits within an operational line item rather than requiring capital investment justification, participation becomes a procurement decision rather than an infrastructure project. That is the structural change that makes it possible for the full supply chain, not just the large enterprises at the top, to participate in the dataspace ecosystem that OEMs and regulators are requiring.

For larger enterprise Participants, the benefit shifts toward operational simplicity and compliance assurance. The platform runs on EU-sovereign cloud infrastructure, the source-available licensing allows internal audit of the components managing their connector, and the managed operational model removes the ongoing infrastructure burden from a team whose core competency is elsewhere.

How does the company know what the customer wants or needs?

The clearest signal on Participant needs comes from the MDS production deployment. With over 150 connectors running across a diverse base of Mobility Data Space participants, mobility sector companies, public institutions, fleet operators, Kaphera has direct operational visibility into where participants encounter friction: where onboarding stalls, what questions support receives most often, and what the gap is between what a participant expects when they join and what they find. That operational feedback is more grounded than any survey of stated preferences.

The SME angle is additionally informed by the structural observation that 85% of the Catena-X supply chain is currently unparticipating, and that cost and complexity are the documented barriers in the ecosystem. This is not Kaphera’s finding alone; it is widely acknowledged within the Catena-X community and reflected in the EU Data Act’s emphasis on SME accessibility. The product decision to structure the shared tier at €20 for the control plane is a direct response to this structural gap, validated by Builder feedback that ~€100/connector/month was difficult to justify per project for smaller clients.

What is the customer journey?

For most Participants, the journey begins with an email or a notification from a major customer or industry body: you need to connect to this dataspace by this date. The Participant’s first question is not “how do I operate an EDC Connector”, it is “how do I make this problem go away.” Their evaluation of Kaphera Cloud is short and pragmatic: can I get this done without becoming an infrastructure team, and what does it cost?

If the Participant arrives through a systems integrator (a Builder who has recommended Kaphera as the infrastructure for the project), the onboarding experience is mediated, the Builder handles the technical steps and the Participant interacts with the outcome. If the Participant arrives directly, through the web console or following a referral from a governance authority, the experience is designed to be self-service and immediate. Create or join an organisation, browse available dataspace profiles, and initiate onboarding with a single action. The platform handles identity establishment, credential issuance, and connector provisioning, with a real-time status tracker showing progress. The dataspace-specific onboarding validation steps vary by dataspace and are outside the platform’s control, but everything Kaphera is responsible for resolves without manual intervention.

Once onboarded and operational, the Participant’s engagement with the platform is low-frequency. They are not there to explore features; they are there to satisfy an obligation reliably. The platform’s value in this phase is stability and invisibility, a connector that works, certificates that are managed, and an operational surface that does not demand their attention unless something needs it. The shared-tier pricing means this ongoing operational simplicity does not require a periodic re-justification of cost. Expansion, joining additional dataspaces as new mandates arrive, follows the same single-step pattern as the first onboarding, which is the point at which the platform’s design shows its compounding value for Participants facing multiple mandates across different dataspaces.

Tier progression

flowchart LR
  SH["Managed Shared<br/>~€20-50/mo<br/>multi-tenant"]
  DE["Managed Dedicated<br/>isolated managed<br/>SLA + TISAX"]
  BY["BYOC<br/>self-host on private cloud<br/>source-available licence"]
  SH -->|"larger team / security review"| DE
  DE -->|"data classification forbids 3rd-party cloud"| BY
  SH -.- PN["petra-novak"]
  DE -.- TB["thomas-brandt"]
  BY -.- DW["dirk-wassermann"]

Graph View

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