Networked European Software and Services Initiatives

A key role for European Technology Platforms

“ … creating European Technology Platforms brining together technological know-how, industry, regulators and financial institutions to develop a strategic agenda for leading technologies”.

Four years later, in March 2007, 31 European Technology Platforms (ETPs) have been created, of which 8 operate in the area of IST:

All platforms aim, together, to deliver solutions that will enable industrial innovations in different application areas, from education and learning to manufacturing and health, in public and private sectors alike. But in this common goal, each platform has a clear role, the relative positioning of ARTEMIS, eMobility, Eniac, NEM and NESSI is key to understand how together they shall all contribute to the future economy and how, individually, they have scoped the outputs they have to deliver to ensure Europe’s future economical growth and a clear driving role in the future of Internet.

In particular, NESSI is the centrepiece of this puzzle, ensuring that a services infrastructure comes to live without which any of the new devices, interfaces and Internet infrastructures can deliver on the overall promise.

European Technology Platforms embody the strategic mechanisms through which Europe will seize new opportunities and exploit its global capability, not only to the benefit of the ICT industry, but also to that of all economic sectors, and in the end, to the benefit of all citizens.

Figure 1. A key role for European Technology Platforms

The evolving role of Technology Platforms

The 3^rd status report on ETPs clearly analyses the opportunity for ETPs to play an important role beyond the definition and implementation of their SRA. An Independent Expert Group appointed by the European Council in October 2005 issued the so-called Aho Report 6. This report identified ETPs as key organisational innovation in the creation and exploitation of innovation-friendly markets”.

In a recent Commission Communication 6 outlining a broad based innovation strategy for the EU, the role of European Technology Platforms to contribute to a new lead market initiative has been outlined: "The Commission will test in 2007 a strategy to facilitate the emergence of innovation friendly lead-markets. In this context, it will conduct, after a public consultation including in particular the Technology Platforms and the Europe INNOVA innovation panels, a detailed analysis of potential barriers to the take-up of new technologies in a limited number of areas. In parallel, using this experience, the Commission will prepare a comprehensive lead markets strategy. "

The role of European Technology Platforms has thus expanded: from defining strategic priorities for research and development at European level to contributing to set the framework under which these investments will provide higher returns for the European economy and society. This role will likely be strengthened in the near future.

The context of NESSI

Launched in September 2005, NESSI focuses on the paradigm shift that is driving the European economy towards a service oriented approach. This shift has an enormous impact on the creation and distribution of software, while at the same time opening opportunities for unprecedented levels of collaboration between companies using such an approach.

NESSI’s industrial goal is to deliver open, standard, interoperable, safe and secure services environments in which all ICT companies, small and large, will be able to provide new solutions by relying on a tested infrastructure and focusing on their key capacities.

After more than 2 years of existence, NESSI has achieved results – and has at the same time fully validated and embraced the European Technology Platform approach. Since September 2005, NESSI has:

• Created the initial community:

   

13 partners united in September 2005 around a common vision for software and services 6. Enlarged to 23 partners on July 2007.

• Defined its Strategic Research Agenda 6

Through its successive volumes, NESSI has defined a holistic model (figure 2) that encompasses different layers:

• The Framework - core technologies

• The Landscape - the business environment in which services will be delivered

• The Adoption – the regulatory, training and standardisation environments that have to be addressed to ensure that services will be able to operate across geographical borders, application areas, domains.

Figure 2 – NESSI’s Holistic model

• Created awareness about- and generated active participation to- NESSI:

Today NESSI includes 300 members and 23 partners. Collectively, this community represents 1.7 Million strong workforce and 490 B€ annual revenues. It also represents leading players including industries, SMEs, Academia and users sharing the vision of a common long term strategy on software and services to contribute to Europe’s competitiveness, job sustainability and quality of life. Its partners are Alcatel, Atos Origin, BT, Engineering, HP, Fraunhofer Institute, IBM, Inria / OW2, Lero, Logica CMG, MoMa, Nokia, SAP, Siemens, Software AG, Sun, Telecom Italia, Rodan Systems, Telefonica, Thales, TIE, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid.

• Organised NESSI through a governance structure

To ensure the right balance between openness and coordination (Figure 3) NESSI’s model foresees different levels of participation and is totally open to all stakeholders through a simple on-line membership process. This has enabled the Community to grow across different directions, with the percentage spread of membership detailed in the following table:

Figure 3– NESSI’s Governance – choosing the level of involvement from staying aware to coordination

To achieve the right level between openness and coordination leading to achievements, NESSI partners operate through internal Committees, namely the Board, Steering, SRA, Strategy & Communication and Standardisation Committees. These Committees are supported by the NESSI Office.

The participative model relies on the NESSI Working Groups open to all NESSI members, of which 12 are currently in operation and more user-oriented ones are foreseen in the near future. How those WGs are located in the NESSI is depicted in Figure 4. These working groups are central to NESSI, uniting around specific topics within the SRA and delivering to the SRA the refined needs and requirements that need to be addressed.

The list of horizontal working groups is the following

The set of vertical working groups is:

We also have the ICT SMEs Working group and Open Source working group.

Figure 4 – NESSI’s Working Groups

In parallel, these working groups are THE place where NESSI partners and members of all types unite to create research areas and analyse existing results for future integration. During 2007 and 2008, new working groups will emerge, most of which will operate in the NESSI Landscape alongside the first eHealth working group. Areas currently under investigation include learning skills, human resources, manufacturing, transport.

• Defined the main output which NESSI expects to deliver, i.e. NEXOF, the open service model, reference architecture, and implementation.

   

NEXOF, the NESSI Open Framework, is an integrated, consistent and coherent set of technologies and associated methods and tools intended to:

1. Provide European Industry and the Public Sector with efficient services and software infrastructures to improve flexibility, interoperability and quality;

2. Master complex software systems and their provision as service oriented utilities;

3. Establish the technological basis, the strategies and deployment policies to speed up the dynamics of the services eco-system;

4. Develop novel technologies, strategies and deployment policies that foster openness, through the increased adoption of open standards and open source software as well as the provision of open services;

5. Fostering safety, security and the well-being of citizens by means of new societal applications, enhanced efficiency of industry and administrations, and competitive jobs.

Thus, the overall ambition of NEXOF is to deliver a coherent and consistent open service framework, ranging from the infrastructure up to the interfaces with the end users, leveraging research in the area of service-based systems to consolidate and trigger innovation in service-oriented economies for the benefit of the whole European Economy.

The NESSI Open Framework will be composed of:

• A Reference Model, to describe the main concepts from the point of view of both technology and business;

• A Reference Architecture, to formalise the model into open specifications allowing the exact implementation of the service environment in different domains and technologies;

• A Reference Implementation, to make NEXOF happen serving as the guide for further NEXOF instantiations by different organisations for different domains adopting different technological approaches. This is a complex of methods, tools and technologies released as open source allowing derivative works;

• A Compliance Test Suite, to validate each NEXOF instance and the related provided services, not only to be fully operational, but also to be compliant with the Reference Architecture so that to assure the maximum interoperability.

NESSI – facing the future

While the first two years of NESSI were intense and successful in uniting a large industrial and research community, its future challenges are focused on:

• Enlarging its user community

• Building up the ICT SME participation to ensure that NEXOF is defined with clear SME support in terms of content, flexibility and accessibility

• Structuring the research in collaboration with academia, international and national initiatives and programmes

• Integrating existing and new research results to generate successful iterations of NEXOF

• Furthering the standardisation links it has already established with OMG, IEEE, ETSI to ensure that the interoperability and security needs are addressed by world-wide standards. NESSI aims at being a key player in this arena and has established a NESSI Standardisation committee to this effect.

• Sustaining the momentum of all its communities and ensuring participation of existing members

• Maintaining the dynamics of the awareness activity, ensuring that NESSI is know and increasing its adoption rate

Through all these challenges, NESSI’s evolution is directly aligned to the European political and research strategies, defined in the Commission’s Communication 6, the ERANET construction and the ETPs roles recognised as key in lead markets and in research coordination.

These specific roles for NESSI are further detailed in the following pages, through Key Challenges identified as important to the general goals of an ETP or specific to NESSI.

Several national initiatives on the S&S area have been created in the last months; some of them were born in parallel and directly linked to NESSI (i.e. Spanish initiative INES) and some others were created after. The final objective of NESSI is to establish links with those national initiatives or technology platforms, focusing this collaboration in the following aspects:

• Creation of Awareness. This consists of informing the general and specialist audience about the existence of NESSI.

• Understanding. This task consists of explaining a more specialist audience and project stakeholders, which benefits the project provides and how the results can be exploited. 

• Action. This stage consists of promoting the active participation in NESSI of the audiences. It also comprises the participation of NESSI in external initiatives and activities, related to the audiences targeted by this task. 

In order to foster coordination between NESSI and national or regional research programmes in the field of Software and Services, a dedicated set of activities have been created. The objective of those is mainly to promote NESSI adoption at national and regional level and to achieve the creation of joint activities.

Conclusions

In summary the main future actions of NESSI will be focus in three main objectives that are related to the challenges that the European Technology Platform is facing.

Most of the efforts will be devoted to the main output of NESSI, the Open Framework, and the integration of research results in future iterations. Development, implementation, integration with other results and dissemination of it will be the tasks in relation with NESSI Open Framework.

It also aims to fully settle up and enable the collaboration with the different national and regional initiatives on the S&S area, in order to ensure a bigger adoption and cooperation with those initiatives and its working groups. Moreover coordination of those national and regional activities is expected.

References

1. The 3^rd ETP Status Report – March 2003 – available from Cordis at ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/technology-platforms/docs/etp3rdreport_en.pdf
   
   

2. Aho press release and report -
   http://ec.europa.eu/invest-in-research/action/2006_ahogroup_en.htm

3. Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions - Putting knowledge into practice: A broad-based innovation strategy for the EU Com 2006 502 / Issued on 13/9/2006

4. “Vision Document 2020 – Software and Services” – long term vision of the NESSI Platform, May 2005 – available from www.nessi-europe.eu

5. NESSI’s SRA – Volume 1 and 3 – available from www.nessi-europe.eu.