Several activities for the development of digital solutions based on 5G (and other) technology is currently taking off in many parts of Europe giving businesses and consumers many opportunities for connecting and efficiently interacting with other business partners, service providers, and social networks. New ecosystems and value networks will evolve, and many business opportunities will occur. At the same time, 5G is not only a new radio access technology offering higher data rates and lower latencies, but it is considered as an enabler for supporting cutting edge tools and applications in the new era of computing continuum (that mixes Cloud, Edge and IoT resources). The resulting new technology platform enables developers to deploy their software not only centrally in the cloud and distributed in the end-users’ laptops and mobile phones, but also at the network edge. This new architecture paves the way for new business models, value chains, and deployment models offering SMEs to serve their clients even better with highly responsive applications and services. Systems could be designed to be more fault tolerant and robust using a combination of backend components deployed centrally and closer to the end-users. 

The main goal of AMBITIOUS is to provide a fundamental technological infrastructure, which will provide advanced data aggregation and clean-up, analytics, AI-enabled forecasting and secure information exchange mechanisms, via a transparent computing continuum infrastructure, to be integrated with existing, mature services (of at least TRL6) of the relevant stakeholders (SMEs), unleashing for them yet unforeseen functionalities and opening up new pathways of commercial exploitation. The envisaged fundamental infrastructure will be provided via the deployment of technological pillars, which will interact with existing services towards supporting the envisioned functionalities. The purpose of a pillar is to provide the same generic functionalities to diverse services (demonstrated by a diverse set of specific use-cases) as a concrete processing chain, aiming at avoiding unnecessary redundancy of resources and budget. New participants (third parties) can easily join via the open calls the project will organize. A variety of sectors will be targeted including safety, smart water management, precise agriculture, as well as innovative digital health and wellbeing services. Our objectives are aligned with the smart specialization priority areas of the participating regions. They are also long-term sustainable both from an ecological, social, and economical viewpoint.