NESSI is the European Technology Platform dedicated to Software and Services. Its name stands for the Networked European Software and Services Initiative.

Seizing the transformation opportunity

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is an essential driving force for innovation and a core enabler of economic growth in the coming years. Enterprises in Europe (both private and public sector) are facing significant structural changes and will rely on software and services to support them in adapting effectively.

This represents a major opportunity for Europe and the NESSI initiative embodies the strategic mechanism through which this opportunity can be seized and exploited globally. Application of innovative technologies will benefit all economic sectors, not just the software and ICT services industry. Globally competitive businesses and efficient public services will benefit all citizens.
Europe faces a period of potentially profound changes: in social attitudes, economic conditions and the business environment. This makes the ability to evolve continuously essential for the users of services, and therefore also for the technology used to deliver them. Technology must be an enabler of change rather than an inhibitor. Enlargement of the European Union and the changing nature of trade with the rest of the world puts a strong emphasis on a multicultural approach to business. This cannot be simply regarded as the need to use different languages, but rather there is a need to adapt more fully to the ways people behave and communicate in different countries and cultures.

Focusing on Services

The main focus of NESSI is that of service. There are many definitions of service used in different contexts. However, all are based on the same principle: a service consumer does not own the service and therefore need not be concerned with all the aspects generally associated with ownership such as infrastructure, technology, integration and maintenance. Instead he/she has only to choose a service which meets his business needs.
Businesses are increasingly concentrating on activities where they can gain a competitive advantage. Supporting capabilities can be obtained as services from specialist providers.

Towards smart services for the Digital Society

In 2010, NESSI initiated an evolution of its vision, taking into account the advent of an increasingly digital society, in which users are become major actors both in the uptake but also the provisioning of smart services. The updated vision extends to 2020 and its revision goes hand in hand with the on-going SRA update process. A number of initiatives and major trends influence the way in which software and services are used and engineered and they create new requirements to be met by the underlying service infrastructure. Based on these observations and the feedback collected from the NESSI community, this NESSI vision statement identifies the opportunities which will be offered by such a future software and service landscape and the challenges which lay ahead on the path towards the Future Internet, and more generally the path towards smart services supporting citizens in their societal and business needs. Future services will become smart in the sense that they will offer enhanced capabilities such as decision‐making support and will be able to anticipate user needs. Click to download the 2010 draft vision statement. To get a more detailed picture of the strategic research directions of NESSI, visit our research publications page.

Achieving impact in the Internet of Services

In today’s Internet, a multitude of commercial and non-commercial players globally deliver Internet Services. Internet services also span many different application areas and technological levels from infrastructure to business level services – and processes from social interaction to fully automated multi-device interaction. It is a multi billion Euro market and complex digital service systems are further becoming key nervous systems of our society. The Internet of Services is expected to remain an open environment of heterogeneous platforms and providers delivering different kind of services – however increasingly collaboration between platforms, federation approaches for similar platforms and open standardization is driving convergence and new combined functional possibilities. In this way, the Internet of Services is as of today at a comparable development stage to the pre-Internet network world where mostly heterogeneous and incompatible networks and providers co-existed without having integrated their forces. Achieving convergence towards an Internet of Services without constraining openness and service innovation is a major challenge for the Internet of the Future. NESSI is contributing to the Internet of Services on the levels of leading-edge research but also contributions to open standards, identification of architectural patterns and contributions to experimental service platforms.

The focus for 2010 to 2015

In the coming years, NESSI will focus its efforts on the following directions:

• pursue its driving role in services research through the identification of future research directions
• support the members community through increased opportunities and flexibility in their concrete involvement
• sustain the research coherence role and NEXOF online repository
• increase the visibility of existing and upcoming results
• formalise its contributions to key application areas, mainly Future Internet, Public Services, Health, Energy and Power distribution
• build on the network of national initiatives to achieve better coordination between European, national and regional research programmes