Networked European Software and Services Initiative

The Networked European Software and Services Initiative, NESSI, is a "European Technology Platform" on Software Architectures and Services Infrastructures.

A European Technology Platform (ETP) is a private-public partnership involving industry and academia that aims to define and coordinate research in areas that are of strategical economic interest for Europe. To achieve its targets, an ETP unites the relevant stakeholders to a) define a Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) and b) coordinate and pro-actively contribute to its implementation.While each ETP defines its own organisation, ETPs are open to all relevant stakeholders, whether users or providers. ETPs collaborate with the European bodies in providing inputs to the research directions and programmes and position papers on key issues. ETPs are not funded by the European Commission and do not participate in any way to the evaluation process of research proposals under the on-going Framework Programmes. The list of all active ETPs is available at http://cordis.europa.eu/technology-platforms/home_en.html Launched in September 2005, NESSI unites a community of over 300 ICT organizations working together to deliver new service platforms that will support the shift to a service oriented economy.

NESSI is coordinated by 22 partners from industry (Alcatel-Lucent, Atos Origin, BT, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, IBM, HP, LogicaCMG, MoMa, Nokia, Rodan Systems, SAP, Siemens, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Thales, TIE) academia (Fraunhofer Institute, Lero and Universidad Politecnica de Madrid) and the open source community (OW2). At the core of NESSI are the 'NESSI members' - over 300 organisations from industry (43% - split between 21% large and 22% SME ICT organizations), academia (50%) and users (4%).

NESSI aims to address the major changes that are driving the IT services marketplace. Today this technological marketplace is changing dramatically and consequently it is increasingly more and more urgent to find new solutions that give greater universal access to a series of multifunctional services - more reliable and less costly - which should also drive growth for European industry as a whole. The NESSI initiative embodies the strategic mechanism through which this sector evolution become an opportunity that can be exploited globally.

The main goal of NESSI is to develop a visionary unified European Strategy for Software and Services driven by a common European Research Agenda where innovation and business strength are reinforced by: - providing European Industry and the Public Sector with efficient services and software infrastructure to improve flexibility, interoperability and quality;- mastering complex software systems and their provision as service oriented utilities;- establishing the technological basis, the strategies and deployment policies to speed up the dynamics of the services eco-system;- developing 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;- fostering safety, security and the well-being of citizens by means of new societal applications, enhanced efficiency of industry and administrations, and competitive jobs;

NESSI aims to implement technologies for services architectures and software and grid infrastructure for industry, governments and administrations and for citizens which will directly get benefits from NESSI thanks to a wider range of user-friendly services which will be available whilst guaranteeing privacy and safety. Through its proposed activities, NESSI hopes to help transform the European economy into a knowledge-based economy, and enable the European software and IT services industry to attain a stronger global position.

One of the grand challenge of NESSI is transforming the Internet ensuring that services can be provided to all, citizens and businesses alike, in safe, secure, reliable, extensible, scalable environments by making the Internet - Alive - allowing new dynamic and user friendly Services - Pervasive - from pervasiveness of ICT to pervasiveness of Trust- Rich - through knowledge- and Invisible - thanks to ICT and middleware infrastructure.

This evolution – from the Net economy to the Service economy - requires a service oriented environment. NESSI organisations have recognised that no single organisation can or should harness the power of such an environment. This is the shared vision uniting the 300 £ organisation members that have joined NESSI and participate to its activities through NESSI Working Groups and Research Projects.

From its initial vision, NESSI has defined through its Strategic Research Agenda volumes the service environment it intends to deliver under the name of NEXOF – the NESSI Open Service Framework.NEXOF consists of three core elements:

*NESSI Open Reference Model: an open specification, which includes the conceptual model of the core elements that enable service-based ecosystems and their relationship as well as underlying rules, principles and policies which lead to interoperable implementations. Core elements include business dynamics, development environment and operational environment.

*NESSI Open Reference Architecture addressing definition and selection of innovative architectural styles and patterns based on the reference model. Our overall ambition being here to pave the way towards a standardized Open Reference Architecture for services and components but also to some extent processes which corresponds to a significant advancement of today’s service-oriented architectures (even service-component ones). This will include the definition of the infrastructure requirements.

*NESSI Open Reference Implementation that makes NEXOF happen, guiding NEXOF instantiations and deployment by different organisations, for different domains, allowing different technological approaches. This is an extensive set of methods, tools and technologies released as open source and allowing both derivative works and instantiations also in proprietary solutions taking the responsibility to deliver to the community at large with the implementation of the NEXOF concepts and approaches where the openness, built on open source and open standards, encompasses three important concepts:

- "open" leading to free usage by other players

- "open" guaranteeing the rights for others to derive new commercial implementations (see more information on this below)

- "open" for all to participate. The delivery of the NESSI Open Reference Implementation (including tools and methods) in an open source environment is key for the NESSI approach to be tested and to gain momentum in various communities of potential users and to address and serve the development of a service-oriented economy.

*A Compliance Test Suite to validate each NEXOF in¬stance not only to be fully operational but also to be compliant with the Reference Architecture so as to as¬sure maximum interoperability.

While NESSI is working to deliver not only the definition of NEXOF but also one open-source implementation of it, NESSI strongly encourages multiple, interoperable, open source or proprietary implementations of NEXOF by other parties, by members and non-members of NESSI.This approach gives each stakeholder the freedom to choose and adapt NEXOF to his business strategy while providing paths that support the increasing push for open-source backbones. The key element is the targeted interoperability between NEXOF implementations that is the corner stone of service compatibility, supporting the fast deployment and seamless availability of existing and new services that are the pillars of NESSI’s vision.NEXOF’s ambition is to be domain, organisation size and technology independent, supported by a sound methodology and tools, instantiated into a broad range of application domains by a number of end-user communities.

How does NESSI operate

NESSI operates according to its governance with the aim to achieve the optimla equilibrium between coordination and active participation.

Coordination is achieved by the partners through a Board, a Steering Committee and various topical committees, such as the SRA Committee that handles the process of elaborating and release the different volumes of the SRA, the Standards Committee responsible for the interaction with the relevant standardisation bodies and the Strategy & Communication Committee that defines and implement the internal and external communication strategies.

However, the centre of gravity of NESSI is its 300+ members and partners, who participate actively to the definition of the SRA and the implementation of NEXOF through NESSI Working Groups, NEXOF’s invitations to contribute and NESSI Research projects.

Working Groups are proposed by members and partners and approved by the NESSI Steering Committee. As of August 2008, 13 Working Groups operate either in technological areas (8 Working Groups), in application areas (public sector and health) or in adoption (linking to Open Source communities, supporting ICT SMEs and interacting with the Future Internet initiative).

NEXOF’s invitations to contribute are public calls where all stakeholders are invited to provide proposals on specific topics that are central to NEXOF’s architecture. Each proposal is supported by a representative who represents the proposal in “investigation teams” created on a topic by topic basis. This open process ensures the widest possible approach to building the resulting NEXOF.

On-going Research

NESSI has defined a research structure. In this structure, NESSI Research projects are on-going collaborations, which are either NESSI Strategic Projects (NSPs) which each contribute key elements to NEXOF or NESSI Compliant Projects which either contribute or are compliant to NEXOF.

As of August 2008, 6 NESSI Strategic Projects are running and additional projects have already registered their compliance and new ones are continuing to do so every day.

The 6 NESSI Strategic Projects are:

*EzWeb – http://ezweb.morfeo-project.org/the EzWeb project delivers an open web mashup platform for the next-generation Internet of Services. It delivers the main components of the front-end web access platform to NEXOF. Its open source approach is intended to facilitate liaison with other open source communities and allows for the incorporation of additional partners. A fully functional beta version is already available.

*Master http://www.master-fp7.euMASTER aims at providing methodologies and infrastructures that facilitate the monitoring, enforcement, and audit of quantifiable indicators on the security of a business process, and that provide manageable assurance of the security levels, trust levels and regulatory compliance of highly dynamic service- oriented architecture in centralized, distributed (multidomain), and outsourcing contexts. MASTER will identify new innovation components in terms of key assurance indicators, key security indicators, protection and regulatory models and security model transformations coupled with the methodological and verification tools for the analysis and assessment of business processes. It will further define an overall infrastructure for the monitoring, enforcement, reaction, diagnosis and assessment of these indicators centralized, distributed (multidomain), and outsourcing contexts. It will show a proof-of-concept implementation in the challenging realms of Banking/Insurance and in the e-Health IT systems. MASTER will deliver a strategic component of the security and trust pillar of NEXOF.

*NEXOF-RA – http://www.nexof-ra.eu/the NEXOF-Reference Architecture project is in charge of providing the NEXOF Reference Model and Architecture, as well as a proof-of concept and roadmap by 2010. It manages the process of the NEXOF invitations to contribute, of which the 1st call was published in July 2008. NEXOF-RA is at the core of the implementation phase of NEXOF and links to all other NESSI Strategic Projects.

*Reservoir - http://www.reservoir-fp7.euThe goal of the Reservoir project is to introduce a powerful ICT infrastructure for the reliable and effective delivery of services as utilities. This infrastructure will support the setup and deployment of services on demand, at competitive costs, across disparate administrative domains, while assuring quality of service. The architecture and reference implementation for a service-oriented infrastructure will be built on open standards and new technologies to provide a scalable, flexible and dependable framework for delivering services as utilities. Based on the emerging “cloud computing” model, Reservoir will use virtualization techniques to allow physical resources from different service providers across the cloud to essentially be pooled while still guaranteeing security and quality of service to customers

*SLA@SOI – http://www.sla-at-soi.euEvolving towards solutions provided as services still relies on significant efforts to create service offers, to negotiate provisioning details with customers and to manage and control provided services – all elements that introduce a static approach and do not support the dynamic nature of a service-oriented economy. SLA@SOI will provide a major milestone for the further evolution towards a service-oriented economy, where IT-based services can be flexibly traded as economic goods, i.e. under well defined and dependable conditions and with clearly associated costs. The SLA@SOI project delivers the following elements to NEXOF: an e-contracting platform between service consumers and providers, a framework for mapping, planning and coordination within multiple levels in an organizational/IT structure and the access and provisioning layer for SLA-aware infrastructure.

*SOA4ALL – http://www.soa4all.euSOA4ALL will deliver a comprehensive framework and infrastructure that integrates four complimentary and revolutionary technical advances into a coherent and domain independent service delivery platform: a) Web principles and technology as the underlying infrastructure for the integration of services at a world wide scale, b) Web 2.0 as a means to structure human-machine cooperation in an efficient and cost-effective manner, c) Semantic Web technology as a means to abstract from syntax to semantics as required for meaningful service discovery, d) Context management as a way to process in a machine understandable way user needs. The SOA4ALL platform will be deployed at use case sites to further validate the technologies in terms of usability, re-usability, added value, interoperability, scalability and breadth of scope.

Main References

The NESSI reference and working documents are publicly available on [http://www.nessi-europe.eu NESSI Website] .These include:
*The [http://62.72.100.94/Nessi/Portals/0/Nessi-Repository/Publications/Flyers/2005_09_Vision_V2.pdf VISION Document] , initial vision on software and services, focused mainly on the shift towards an economy in which the main delivery mode is achieved through services rather than monolithic products.
*The [http://62.72.100.94/Nessi/Portals/0/Nessi-Repository/Common/Governance/NESSI_Governance_v1.0_final.pdf GOVERNANCE Document] , explaining how NESSI is organised between partners, members, committees and working groups.
*The [http://www.nessi-europe.com/Nessi/Portals/0/Nessi-Repository/Common/Governance/NESSI%20WG%20Governance%20v1%2000.pdf NESSI Working Groups GOVERNANCE Document]
*NESSI Letter of Intent Document
*NESSI POSITION PAPERS
*The STRATEGIC RESEARCH AGENDA – SRA which translates the NESSI vision into action and guide NESSI implementations. It has been published in 3 different volumes and each volume addresses a different aspect (roadmap, areas of research, road to implementation).
*Vol. I - SRA - Volume 1 - March 2006 - Framing the context
*Vol. II - SRA – Volume 2 (Draft edition) – December 2007 – A strategy to build NESSI
*Vol. III - SRA – Volume 3 – February 2008 – NESSI Roadmap for FP7 (2009-2010)

ee also

* European Technology Platform
* Joint Technology Initiative
* Software Innovation

References

* [http://www.nessi-europe.com/Nessi/Portals/0/Nessi%20repository/Publications/Flyers/2006_01_NESSI_HolsticView.pdf NESSI Holistic view]
* [http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/05/489&format=HTML&aged=1&language=EN&guiLanguage=en Official launch of the Technology Platform NESSI] (7 September 2005)

External links

* [http://www.nessi-europe.eu NESSI - Networked European Software and Services Initiative]
* [http://www.servicewave.eu ServiceWave 2008 - 10 -> 13/12/2008]