Aims for 40% cost reductions in the design, deployment and management of e-service blends
As governments and businesses across Europe increasingly rely on information and e-services from a myriad of industries and sectors — from transportation, energy and water, to housing and health care — there is a growing desire among them to have the ability to combine the core competencies their proprietary systems offer with core competencies of other organizations, to achieve greater results that transfer into enhanced, smarter, more cost-effective customer services.
“Today, companies need to invest a considerable amount of time, expertise, and maintenance to develop ad hoc proprietary systems that coordinate these myriad e-services,” explained Professor Guiseppe De Giacomo, University of Rome La Sapienza. “More often than not, these systems are application specific and do not have the flexibility to support variations that stem from different geographical regions or shifts in the marketplace, and are not able to scale up as the business grows.”
The idea is to provide a cloud hosted hub based on ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) which can combine unique service offerings and more effectively hand-off processes and data. After all, the government manages upwards of 40% of the economy (and growing) in many European countries. This development gives small business a better chance to participate.
The application will push cloud computing technology by enabling and operating an open source semantic language entirely within the cloud. The benefits are rather large for business – pay for usage without up front capital costs along with the natural scalability of cloud technology – and provide integrative services across a broad spectrum of industries and business providers.
In an era where even the vast ocean of government data is difficult to obtain for potentially interested businesses, this is an interesting development to say the least. Readers of this website will intuit the author’s great respect for IBM. Their ability to restructure and thrive after having so drastically bungled their strategy in personal computing technology, gifting their own future to Microsoft and Intel, is one of the storied turnarounds in the modern age. It is decades later, and they have long ago successfully moved on.
