IRF 2008, taking place at Resort Schwielowsee, Potsdam, Germany, May 28 - 29, 2008, will center on the topic "The Web-Based Service Economy and the Internet of Services."

The Web-Based Service Industry

Service industries have become the largest and fastest growing business sector in the world over the last decade. They now employ more people, by far, than any other sector. For the growth in this sector to continue, companies are faced with unprecedented pressure to make services more widely and easily available – and to yield higher productivity. Moreover, this rapid growth follows on the heels of the restructuring of national economies through deregulation and globalization. Together, these pressures are forcing companies to focus on core competencies and innovation while trying to lower their total cost of ownership through outsourcing.

Enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) holds the key for businesses in vertical industries to consolidate and repurpose business applications to meet dynamic market needs. Through a sophisticated software stack, enterprise SOA allows large business applications to be accessed through self-contained, reusable, and adaptable enterprise services. Once in place, enterprise services provide the basis for flexible interoperability and can be composed into long-running business processes, spanning boundaries both between and within organizations. With the maturity of Web services and enterprise SOA investments, new delivery models are emerging for trading services outside traditional ownership and provisioning boundaries.

Following the successes of Amazon and eBay, on-demand software-as-a-service marketplaces have emerged. Some companies are leveraging the development community and widely available Web services to expand offerings of hosted business applications. In turn, mainstream industries are capitalizing on service-enablement investments by turning to the private sector for value-added service partnerships. As seen through the Singapore government's TradeXchange, regulatory trade services are being aggregated with Services such as logistics and goods tracking through third parties. Meanwhile, in telecommunications, consumers are experiencing services as content and, increasingly, enterprise services become crucial differentiators for slim-margin mobile services.

Internet of Services

These developments are setting the stage for the next service-oriented revolution – the Internet of Services. As open service partnerships and service ecosystems have grown quickly, their limitations have become clear. For example, the mechanisms for consolidating service delivery are one-off processes and cannot be reused without incurring large overhead. The mechanisms result in oligarchies, limiting further service growth to narrow governance and proprietary platforms.

Through the Internet of Services, it is envisaged that these barriers will be removed and give way to a level playing field for service supply and access. Beyond ordering books, querying maps, booking flights and the like, commoditized business transactions from mainstream industries are set to take off as the next wave of consumable services. Services like property conveyance, business formation, and recording life events (such as births and marriages) entail complex integration challenges. These are long-running services and must be implemented through legacy applications hosted by providers. Access to these services requires interactions with back-end applications and several agencies. Navigation of such services therefore needs to be as seamless for consumers as moving between Web pages and needs to be facilitated by semantic descriptions of services and their interactions.

At the same time, not only individuals but also business processes are expected to be consumers of "cloud" services. When harnessed through business processes, services such as environment sensors and decision support (data mash-ups) streamline otherwise out-of-band operations like exception handling. They draw business processes out of internal stovepipes and rigid business-to-business (B2B) interactions and into real-world awareness and agility. Ultimately, they are rendering tomorrow's dynamic collaboration and future value networks, as anticipated by service industries and the research community.