Invinet Sistemes

Late May in bright Rome. Interesting two-days conference on PEPPOL project: achievements and project follow-up.

Wearing his typical chinese clothes, Tim McGrath, the most European Australian people ever, was the facilitator of the PEPPOL conference.

First day, Alain Deckers from DG Internal Market has explained the new perspectives on e-Procurement in Europe and the several strategies the Commission is pushing to achieve the goal of 2016 such as the Golden Book of e-Procurement or the e-Procurement Experts Group.

After that we have seen how countries like Italy, France or Scotland are building electronic Procurement based on the infrastructure, signature and semantic specifications developed within PEPPOL. Presentations have been performed by Francesco Paolo Schiavo, Head of Central Directorate for Information Systems and Innovation  at Ministry of Economy and Finance in Italy, Christophe Alviset Deputy Director at the Secretary General of the Ministry of Economics, Finance and Foreign Trade and Alastair Merrill Director of Procurement in the Scottish Government.

PEPPOL future has been explained by André Hoddevik. The open PEPPOL community will take over to help new PEPPOL adopters.

Before lunch we have had a panel discussion on the future of e-Procurement.

During lunch we have been in the booth, Oriol Bausà has demonstrated how invoices can be easily sent through the PEPPOL network using the b2brouter.net free einvoicing portal.

In the afternoon, the conference has been split in two parallel sessions. The pre-award and the post-award tracks. We have been in the pre-award sessions, where there have been two panels with real implementations of the VCD and the eCatalogues. The VCD implementation has been demonstrated by Ansgar Mondorf from Germany, Gerda Bayer from Austria, Paola Fumiani from Italy,  Thierry Amadieu from France and Andriana Prentza from Greece. This panel was led by Maria Wimmer, from the University of Koblenz.

The eCatalogue panel was led by Giancarlo di Stefano from Consip and there were demonstrations from Johannes Wimmer from Austria, Tonino Castrichino from Italy, Thierry Amadieu from France and Thomas Beergrehn from Norway.

The second day, Jean-François Junger, Head of Sector in DG Information Society and Media, European Commission has explained the “Connecting Europe Facility” 2014-2020 plan to invest 2 bilion € for publich services to help building the electronic single market in Europe. Main idea of CEF is to build digital bridges by creating a common infrastructure and a set of services:

• Core Services: eID, eDelivery, eSignature
• Specific Services: eProcurement, eJustice, eHealth

Junger said: “The future is potentially bright”

After this interesting presentation, we have had presentations from the five LSP (Large Scale Projects) SPOCS, e-CODEX, Stork, epSOS and PEPPOL  that are told to cooperate and work together from 2014 to 2020 to make the electronic single market to happen.

Following LSP presentations, the CEN BII project has been presented by Jostein Fromyr and Kornelis Drijfhout as the foundation for the PEPPOL and ePrior projects.

André Hoddevik introduced openPEPPOL as the fora where the PEPPOL community will continue their development.

A good presentation from Anna-Lis Berg from IBM followed Andrés’ openPEPPOL with a strong message: “ICT Industry and service providers should join OpenPEPPOL, because this is our future”.

Finally there was a pannel to discuss about the growing of the PEPPOL community and Francisco García Morán, General Director at European Commission, DG Informatics closed the meeting with the final conference with some important messages:

• Compulsory paperless pre-award procurement by 2016.
• PEPPOL is lowering administrative burden.
• e-Prior is being used by the Commission since 2009 and it is released as open source.
• e-Prior is fully aligned with the PEPPOL work
• Commission working together with PEPPOL for the Long Term Sustainability of the PEPPOL infrastructure
• OpenPEPPOL can be one of the bridges to grow

Last message from Francisco García Morán : GOOD BYE PEPPOL, WELCOME OPEN PEPPOL