Technology analysis, software architecture and feasibility studies for R&D consortia

Cargoffer offers consortium partners its technology analysis and architecture capability for the early stages of R&D projects. We help coordinators and work-package leads make well-grounded technical decisions before committing significant project budget, and we continue to support those decisions through architecture review during execution.

We contribute expertise in:

• Technology scouting and landscape analysis: surveying existing open-source and commercial options for a given problem, comparing them on technical and operational criteria, and producing a written recommendation that the consortium can actually act on.

• Software architecture design: defining service boundaries, API contracts, data models and deployment topology for new systems; reviewing and challenging architectures proposed by other partners; and producing architecture decision records (ADRs) that survive staff turnover.

• Feasibility studies: from "is this technically possible at the scale we need" to "what would it cost to build and run this for the duration of the project and three years after".

• Build-vs-buy analysis: when to integrate an existing open-source project, when to license a commercial component, and when to build from scratch — applied with the discipline of a team that has done all three.

• Risk analysis for technical work packages: identifying the assumptions most likely to be wrong, the integrations most likely to be brittle, and the operational concerns (security, data residency, EU compliance) most likely to bite late in the project.

• Open-source due diligence: when a consortium plans to build on an external open-source project, we can review the project's health (maintenance activity, governance, licence, security posture) and flag risks before they become blockers.

• Reference deployments and prototypes: when the analysis concludes that a small prototype is the fastest way to validate a decision, we can build it.

We are open to contributing this expertise to Horizon Europe 2026-2027 consortia across clusters, particularly during the proposal preparation phase (where solid technology analysis strengthens a bid) and during the first months of execution (where architecture decisions lock in the rest of the project).