New members strengthen the open source effort to build a federated, interoperable European cloud infrastructure

BRUSSELS, March 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The NeoNephos Foundation today announced that BWI GmbH, SUSE LLC, and Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST have joined as members, expanding the ecosystem working to advance open, interoperable cloud infrastructure in Europe. New membership growth signals NeoNephos' role as an important building block in the future of the sovereign digital and physical security apparatus of the European Union.

BWI GmbH joins as a Premier Member, with SUSE LLC as a General Member and Fraunhofer ISST as an Associate Member. Their participation brings additional industry, research and public sector expertise to the NeoNephos community as it develops open source technologies supporting a federated cloud‑to‑edge architecture.

Launched one year ago, the NeoNephos Foundation supports the goals of the European Union's Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI‑CIS). The initiative aims to lay the groundwork for seamless usage of cloud and edge services across European providers. 

"Open source collaboration is essential for building the next generation of trusted cloud infrastructure," said Christian Neu, governing board chair of the NeoNephos Foundation. "The addition of BWI GmbH, SUSE LLC and Fraunhofer ISST to the NeoNephos member community demonstrates strong momentum behind open, interoperable cloud technologies that give organizations greater choice, flexibility and control over their infrastructure."

Foundation members collaborate to build technologies that support an interoperable cloud‑to‑edge continuum across industries including cloud infrastructure, SaaS, platform services, and public sector systems.

"As its primary partner for digitalization we contribute to the continuous improvement of the command, control and operational capabilities of the Bundeswehr," said Dr. Christian Marwitz, chief digital officer on the management board of BWI GmbH. "By building a private multi-cloud for the German Armed Forces, we aim to move towards agile, modular, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud-based architectures that meet the requirements regarding resilience, sovereignty, interoperability, and security of their IT systems. We base that multi-cloud platform on core technologies derived from reliable partners and a healthy European open-source ecosystem. That is why we engage in the NeoNephos Foundation and become a significant part of this ecosystem."

"NeoNephos offers us an exciting partner network with which we want to advance lifecycle management in an edge‑cloud continuum," said Heinrich Pettenpohl, head of department IT service providers at Fraunhofer ISST. "Our goal is to shift and reduce resource consumption and adapt it to the required environments and use cases. We also look forward to collaborating on infrastructure assistants for optimization and error analysis."

"For over 30 years, SUSE has pioneered open source solutions to deliver unparalleled choice and innovation to our customers," said Diego Akechi, general manager of the SAP business unit at SUSE. "Alongside partners like SAP, we take pride in making open source a reliable, trusted foundation for the world's most critical enterprises. Joining NeoNephos reinforces our commitment to open source and our core beliefs around collaboration and trust as the way to accelerate innovation for the EU open source community."

The NeoNephos member community includes organizations such as SAP SE, STACKIT, T‑Systems International GmbH, x‑cellent technologies GmbH, Cyberus Technology, Liquid Reply, Nearby Computing, ape factory, TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research), plusserver, 23 Technologies GmbH, SBA Research, Elastx AB, Kubermatic GmbH, and CLYSO GmbH.

Organizations interested in contributing to the NeoNephos ecosystem can learn more at neonephos.org.

About the Linux Foundation and Linux Foundation Europe
Linux Foundation Europe is the Brussels-based European chapter of the Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects, including Linux, Kubernetes, Model Context Protocol (MCP), OpenChain, OpenSearch, OpenSSF, OpenStack, PyTorch, Ray, RISC-V, SPDX and Zephyr, provide the foundation for global infrastructure. The Linux Foundation is focused on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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Media Contact
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NeoNephos Foundation
Governing Board Chair
christian.neu@sap.com 

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SOURCE Linux Foundation Europe