Internet of Services - Lightweight Composition and Enterprise Mashups @ SAP Research St. Gallen

Nowadays, Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) focus mainly on firm intern integration of applications and are not widely adopted to support the emerging globally networked information service economy. On hurdle observed on the way to a truly global approach to SOA is the fact that performance of information services is low compared to more mature industries. Current technologies and architectures do not provide efficient and effective support. However, recently numerous novel use cases demonstrate the great potential of combining the technologies and principles of Web 2.0 and SOA. One major example of the convergence of the two philosophies is the emergence of an Internet of Services (IoS). Up to now, normal Internet users with little IT sophistication haven't been able to easily retrieve and use certain services. This is because these services mostly reside within company boundaries and are only accessed for professional use in a corporate context. However, the provision of easily accessible services for end users might drive a novel generation of Internet use and allow for the ad-hoc setup and configuration of IT supported business models. Without an intuitive "face" toward human users, Web-based services will remain fairly unusable by the common Web surfer, because currently these interfaces (such as those described in WSDL) are designed to be processed by machines. New concepts emerging to solve the described problems are lightweight composition and enterprise mashups. Enterprise mashups in an Enterprise context aim at enabling the users to dynamically compose and interconnect their own operational environments and processes in a very simple and flexible fashion.

In our talk, we will elaborate in detail on how the significant changes of the IT Industry affect stakeholders (resource providers, consumers and intermediaries), applications (types, development, management) and infrastructure (interfaces, composition, protocols). We further present the most related research projects carried out at the SAP Research Campus-based Engineering Center in St. Gallen, Switzerland.