Texo is a research project within the THESEUS research program initiated by the German Federal Ministry of Economy and Technology (BMWi). THESEUS aims to develop a new Internet-based infrastructure in order to improve both the usability and practicability of knowledge available on the Internet. Within Theseus, Texo contributes to business aspects in the form of future business value networks in the context of service economies.

Work on Texo is led by SAP Research in collaboration with eleven partners from academia and the industry. The SAP team consists of researchers coming from SAP Research centers in Karlsruhe, Dresden, and Darmstadt in Germany, and Brisbane in Australia.

Texo is expected to provide a platform that:

• Makes services tradable on the Internet
• Allows composition of services into more value-added services
• Integrates customized services into the environment of service consumers
• Provides a holistic understanding of services

The Texo project will help retrieve, coordinate, compose, and access services. A possible implementation scenario could consist of the design, provision, trading, consumption, and billing of services which support product engineers in their innovation processes by taking new requirements into account. An example for such a service could be found in the certified calculation of a product's eco-value to guarantee compliance with new laws. The engineers find services using drag-and-drop to add new requirements to the Texo platform. They select the most appropriate function – according to their preferences for a particular price model – and integrate the service on-the-fly into their own working environment. Subsequently, the services may be consumed – the eco-value of the product is calculated – and will be billed by the service provider.

The Texo platform will help all organizations – especially SMEs and users – to become more agile in today's economy by focusing on their core competencies and using externally provided services for non-core activities. Moreover, Texo will allow SMEs to offer and publish their services, to extend their product offering or represent their business know-how to a larger community of potential service users.

Learn more about Texo.