That level of interest said more than any introduction we had prepared: the market is ready for answers. This session was organized entirely by the Data Space Adoption Forum (DSAF), which IDSA hosts as a neutral convening space. And from the moment the doors opened, it was clear that participants had not come for high level reflections. They came for solutions that are practical, scalable, and ready to use.
What changed in Madrid: adoption became a service
The session began with a direct observation: current onboarding speeds do not align with real supply chain scales. But instead of dwelling on the problem, the focus moved immediately to the tools and structures that can change this.
Two short demos, each roughly ten minutes, demonstrated far more than any slide deck could. They showed an onboarding flow that looked like a standard digital service journey: a provider offers a ready‑made service, a partner guides the customer, the participant follows a structured onboarding path, and data sharing begins without a custom integration project.
This was the essential point: Joining a data space must become as operationally normal as activating any modern SaaS product. One participant captured this shift by describing how data spaces should move SMEs away from project based, point-to-point integrations toward a click-and-connect model. That framing landed strongly in the room.
The “last mile” solution: Scale through existing trust networks
Across the panel, there was a striking consensus: SMEs enter digital ecosystems through people they already trust.
Several contributors emphasized that local SMEs tend to rely on their established IT partners and managed service providers. These partners are day-to-day trust anchors. When they are part of the solution, onboarding accelerates naturally. Onboarding SMEs in a single day through just a few phone calls is something that could have scaled to hundreds if more participants had been available.
This mirrors what we hear regularly inside the Data Space Adoption Forum: SMEs do not want to become experts in connector operations or distributed trust frameworks. They want a managed service, provided by someone they already know, with predictable effort and predictable cost.
This is why the approach presented in Madrid places distribution at the center. Cloud infrastructure providers and MSPs already support thousands of SMEs. They operate established partner networks. And they know how to deliver repeatable onboarding processes. The DSAF work connects this proven distribution model with the requirements of data spaces.
The operational stack: Cutting costs, hiding complexity, improving compatibility
For executives in the room, the most relevant shift was the transition from install and integrate to provision and govern. What hindered that shift were three recurring constraints across deployments – cost, complexity, and compatibility. The work unveiled in Madrid responded to each with tangible components:
Multi‑tenant operation to reduce cost
Virtualization developments around the connector architecture now allow multiple participants to be served in a single controlled runtime. This significantly reduces overhead and aligns with SME usage patterns.
Automated provisioning to remove operational complexity
A repeatable onboarding journey requires standardized, automated provisioning. The Connector Fabric Manager concept supports this, handling tenant creation and resource orchestration without each organization having to build its own DevOps environment.
Pluggable data planes for compatibility
Rather than forcing every organization to rebuild integrations, reusable data plane components and standardized signaling create an ecosystem of interoperable options. This directly reduces barriers for domains with specific protocols or formats.
For SMEs, this simplifies the equation. The mechanics are manageable, effort is predictable, and onboarding becomes a service rather than a project.
A group effort, by design
One point is important to state explicitly: Nothing presented in Madrid came from a single organization. The DSAF session was the product of many actors working in alignment – IDSA convening the ecosystem, cloud and infrastructure providers bringing service models, dataspace initiatives defining operational requirements, research organizations providing governance and modelling structure, and open-source communities enabling transparent, shared components.
Our session summarized this dynamic with the observation that broad adoption accelerates when a diverse community drives it. Not a handful of large players, but thousands of organizations, connected through shared standards and trusted partners.
And that is ultimately what the DSAF represents: not a single tool or platform, but a coordinated operating model that makes trusted data sharing accessible, scalable, and genuinely usable.
