The intense ongoing work towards 5G readiness has reached the point where the performance gains provided by 5G infrastructures should be exploited by third party innovators and SMEs, to create a new, open and dynamic ecosystem from both technology and marketing perspectives. Towards the materialization of the 5G performance gains at application and market level, key contributions are expected by the domain of design and development of Network Application (NetApp). In this context, EVOLVED-5G endorses the vision where the world of NetApps follows the paradigm of mobile applications hosted in a related market place. Moreover, the EVOLVED-5G project will contribute towards the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0. Recognized as one of the major vertical industries by 5G-PPP (referring to the digital evolving of workspaces), Industry 4.0 brings innovative use cases, yet technologically challenging, and create a fertile environment for
SME-driven entrepreneurship, where new use case-tailored functions (as NetApps) can be provided to compose a digitalized, secure, and automated generation of the industrial operations (mainly referring to functions for process and machine control as well as procedures for advanced product lifecycle management). The industry-oriented EVOLVED-5G NetApps will be tested, validated, and certified in a vendor-agnostic experimentation platform, and progressively define the first set of NetApps that the EVOLVED-5G marketplace will host.