Cloud Services

Summary form only given. Cloud Computing has been identified as one of the major IT trends for the upcoming decades, long before it grew in interest as a result of the current economic crisis. Cloud Computing will shift the economic landscape of information and communication technologies to the same magnitude as did the first wave of the Internet. It will change the way people work and the way companies operate profoundly, allowing digital technology to penetrate all dimensions of economy and society. It facilitates access and empowers individuals and small companies to participate in the information economy on par with large companies. SAP Research addresses Cloud Computing as part of its research on Systems Technology, to understand the impact of changes in the software engineering process, standardization of interfaces, performance characteristics, reliability of infrastructures and security challenges in the context of enterprise applications. As the adoption of Cloud Services to rebuild large application sets to fit onto the new infrastructures, the Internet of Services approach enables a direct connectivity to the compute resources. The use and trading of services (also referred to as the internet of services) will quickly outpace the trading of goods, setting up opportunities for a brand new set of offerings to fuel the economy transformation, both on a national and global level. This is already happening with a great deal of success in the consumer space, giving a preview of how this could evolve in the enterprise world. Existing business service providers started to enter the space by delivering bundled offerings of software as a service in the cloud, as well as full outsourcing services. Overall, in this space, Cloud Computing will accelerate the globalization process. With very few barriers, the trading and brokering of services developed and hosted in the cloud might quickly end up being concentrated in the hands of a few large global players. These play- - ers will take full advantage of their ability to assemble their value chain with the best components from all over the world, giving limited space for national vendors to play. This is similar to what happened in traditional supply chains. My presentation will outline some of the major characteristics of Cloud Services, and then concentrate on the architecture for the Internet of Services. A couple of examples from industries such as banking, insurance, urban management and retail will illustrate on how the technology advancement in Cloud Services will change the way the business applications will be build and used.