IBM, EU form cloud research consortium

HAIFA, ISRAEL: IBM joined European Union, industry and academia, to launch a research consortium which aims to help businesses take advantage of Internet-based services - or "e-services".

The unique effort focuses on the development of a new computer science model that will enable organizations to accelerate the typically time-intensive process around the coordination of e-services and increase the automation and efficiency around deploying new e-service blends.

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The research will also enable small to mid-sized businesses to create or join into flexible e-service blends, without investing in expensive IT expertise. The initiative will create open-source software to enable many organizations around the world take advantage of the technology.

"Up until now, organizations have had to invest significant time and money in conventional, mostly manual blending and customizing efforts to enable their e-business service operations to communicate and work collaboratively," said Fabiana Fournier, consortium leader and scientist at IBM Research.

In the consortium, IBM researchers are collaborating with experts from: Sapienza Universita degli Studi di Roma, Italy; Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy; Imperial College Of Science, Technology and Medicine, UK; Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands; University of Tartu, Estonia; Indra Software Labs SLU, Spain; Collibra NV, Belgium.

Called Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI), the project tackles the challenges faced by most e-businesses today in simplifying and streamlining the costly process of blending multiple, separately managed e-services into a dynamic, organic whole. The consortium plans to demonstrate that the new framework can reduce the cost of creating industry-specific service blends by 40 percent over conventional techniques.

ACSI interoperation hubs will be provided as SaaS — software as a service and hosted in cloud environments. This will enable businesses to enjoy a pay-per-use model for data storage, task executions, and service integration costs.