The European Union and universities have joined forces with IBM to research new Cloud Computing models to reduce the cost of hosting and maintaining Internet-based services.
The consortium will undertake research that could lead to the development of new computer science models that bring together managed Internet-based services from diverse hardware and software environments in a flexible cloud environment.
The new design and deployment models could help cut costs compared with conventional models, which are complex and require significant time and cost to maintain, IBM said. The current systems are not flexible and need to be manually customised for services to communicate and work together. The researchers hope to establish a framework to cut down the design and deployment time for such services by hosting them in a central Cloud environment.
The researchers will undertake a project called Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI), which is based on a concept of interoperation hubs, which was introduced by IBM Research last year. These hubs provide cloud-based environments in which flexible Internet-based software and services can easily be created and deployed. Customers would pay for service integration and pay for the hosted services depending on data stored and transactions completed. Consortium partners will develop services and applications for the project.
Dr Fabiana Fournier, consortium leader and scientist at IBM Research, said: "Up until now, organisations have had to invest significant time and money in conventional, mostly manual blending and customising efforts to enable their e-business service operations to communicate and work collaboratively. ACSI represents a new combination of computer science principles that are designed to enable businesses to retain a laser focus on operations and goals as they achieve new efficiencies in blending and interleaving e-services."
The universities involved in the project include Sapienza Universita di Roma, Italy; Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy; Imperial College United Kingdom; Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands; University of Tartu in Estonia and Collibra NV in Belgium.
"Today, companies need to invest a considerable amount of time, expertise, and maintenance to develop ad hoc proprietary systems that coordinate these myriad e-services," explained Professor Guiseppe De Giacomo, University of Rome La Sapienza. "More often than not, these systems are application specific and do not have the flexibility to support variations that stem from different geographical regions or shifts in the marketplace, and are not able to scale up as the business grows."
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