New research and business opportunities

for SMEs through the adoption of NEXOF,

the open platform for creating services
Francesco RUFFINO1, Tonny VELIN2, Juan Vicente VIDAGANY3
1
NICE, Via Marchesi di Roero 1, Cortanze (AT), 14020, Italy
Tel: +39 0141 901516, Fax: +39 0141 901417, Email: francesco@nice-software.com
2
Answare Tech s.l., c/Tablas de Daimiel 2 P2 1ºB, Alcorcón, 28925, Spain
Tel: +34 91 6197445, Fax: +34 91 6195289, Email: tvelin@answare-tech.com
3
Antara Information Technology s.l., Plaza del Temple 3, 4ºA, Valencia, 46003, Spain
Tel: +34 963125376, Fax: +34 901022317, Email: jvvidagany@antara.ws
Abstract: The ambition of NESSI (European Technological Platform for Software
& Services) is to deliver NEXOF, a coherent and consistent open service framework
leveraging research in the area of service-based systems to consolidate and trigger
innovation in service-oriented economies. This paper describes how Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT) based SMEs can make benefit of the adoption
of NEXOF features to a) bridge the gap between research project results and ICT
industry and b) better compete in bringing high levels of availability and scalability
for their services by applying NEXOF assets and empower their ICT solutions and
deliver these solutions through the Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm.

1. Introduction
Software systems and applications become every time more complex. Service
requirements also become more and more demanding in terms of availability and
performance. Software becomes an increasing element in the ICT value chain and is a
major cost driver. Today’s budgets and competitive markets call for improved methods and
tools for reducing costs of systems development and maintenance. For those reasons there
is a strong need for advanced methodologies that can constitute the backbone on which
ICT-based companies can provide their community of users with reliable services.

NESSI is the European Technological Platform for Software & Services

(http://www.nessi-europe.eu) that aims at answering to the questions how and when will be
achieved the evolution from the delivery of software towards a service-oriented model. The
overall ambition of NESSI is to deliver NEXOF, a coherent and consistent Open service
Framework leveraging research in the area of service-based systems to consolidate and
trigger innovation in service-oriented economies and designed to guarantee quality of
service, ubiquitous operation and continuous availability. NESSI has identified the strategy
and the plan to build this framework for creating and delivering applications enabling the
creation of service based ecosystems (for all kind of industrial sectors) where service
providers and third parties easy collaborate. NESSI offers a soft bridge to evolve towards
the research lines that are beginning to be defined as strategic by the EU. Words like “the
future internet”, the internet of the objects, web3.0, etc are in the field of NESSI, and
supported by NEXOF as a common platform to support in a holistic way the evolutions that
will happen in the new economy of the services.
 This paper targets on ICT-based SMEs (a key factor for economic growth and job
creation) and describes how they can make benefit of the adoption of NESSI/NEXOF
features to a) bridge the gap between research project results and ICT-based industry and b)
better compete in bringing high levels of availability and scalability for their software
services delivery by applying the NEXOF assets to empower their solutions for the ICT
market and deliver these solutions through the Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm.

2. Objectives
The objectives aim at demonstrating how NESSI/NEXOF can help ICT-based SMEs to:
1. Act a bridge between FP7 research projects and the ICT-based industry: apply FP7
projects results to industry and identify gaps from industry needs.
2. Improve and boost their businesses (e.g. supply chain development) through the
delivery of innovative solutions in a vast spectrum of industrial and service sectors:
Aerospace, Defense, Automotive, Energy, Banking, Health, etc.
3. Work under a regulated – standardized - Service architecture, with different
implementations, to compose the final architectural choice suitable for final users,
ensuring interoperability and reuse of already existing services, thus offering the final
user with rapid, high quality, scalable solutions based on services already developed.
4. Make maximum benefit of working model such as the Software as a Service (SaS)
paradigm that can illuminate the path for the rest of the SMEs.
5. Set up valuable partnerships with key industrial and service sectors in Europe.
6. Contribute to remove the bottlenecks that prevent SMEs to get involved into RTD
programmes by helping SMEs at expressing and covering their research needs and
interests and allowing better mapping of SMEs potentialities and role in RTD fields.

3. Methodology
The target is the Software and Services sector mainly composed by ICT-based SMEs
(developers, end users, researchers). The overlying strategy relies on the following issues:
 Understand the NEXOF context (Features, Advantages, Benefits) and the current
achievements through the already existing NESSI Strategic Projects (NSPs) and the
position of NEXOF in the near future (but ready to work) Services Oriented Economy.
The intention is to capitalise the full spectrum of NEXOF potential advantages offered
by the experience acquired through the projects already developed.
 Get practical advice on how to use NEXOF as a platform to:
- Highlight innovative achievements by discussing the eAdoption of NEXOF as an
emerging standard in the ICT sector.
- Get access to new knowledge and information of strategic character, thus improving
the technological basis of the SMEs.
- Develop better supply chains with higher quality and derive competitive advantage
at the cutting edge in innovation.
- Open new potential markets and gain access to business opportunities.
- Identify technological gaps and capture and implement SMEs research needs by
expressing research opportunities based on the NESSI Strategic Research Agenda
(SRA) and NEXOF deployment roadmap.
- Give lessons learnt from business case studies and provide a ground for discussion
of future oriented technologies in Software and Services.
 Collaborate with other european partners, establish contacts of strategic interest (large
companies), share the technological and industrial risks of SMEs research needs.
The following drawing depicts the value chain of NEXOF from the SMEs viewpoint.

Figure 1: The added value derived from NEXOF adoption by ICT-based SMEs

From the adoption of NEXOF findings, studies are realized that lead to the development
of prototypes. From prototypes, products are developed, each product being the
customization of a prototype for a specific type of application within a specific industrial
sector. From products, new knowledge and identification of gaps are extracted that can feed
the NEXOF concept to make it richer. This allows an effective evolution path of NEXOF.
The intention is to adopt a service development model in which there is a common core of
the infrastructure that allows for reusability whenever and wherever possible. The core is
used on a free basis by all the companies developing services. The core is fed by new
functionalities developed by companies. So any company can make benefits from
developments realized by other companies, e.g. customization, adaptations, etc and even
from different industrial sectors. The core is therefore a merging pot that compiles the
know-how of all companies developing services. It integrates new knowledge and therefore
grows in terms of functionalities and capabilities. The core makes benefit and capitalize
from past experience of miscellaneous industrial domains.

This approach will allow SMEs to address NEXOF since the very beginning and to
convert the technical challenges of developing services into competitive advantages for the
SMEs. Also, the use of the same engineering approach and methodology for the definition
of services reduces the learning time for the staff developing services. This will reduce the
financial and schedule risks of developing complete systems and services from scratch and
provide better-quality products at the end allowing fast deployment of the services. SMEs
and NEXOF will contribute to Europe’s major challenge that is the need to be
technologically innovative in order to preserve competitiveness through the delivery of
products and processes underpinned by innovation in the global marketplace.

SMEs therefore have a competitive advantage as they are at the intersection between the
NEXOF and the application of NEXOF in the industry. This key position ensures long term
continuity for providing services around NEXOF, as core business activity. To implement
this strategy, there are already mechanisms in place that encourage for the participation in
NEXOF activities in order to get reusable knowledge and advices:
 NESSI Initiatives have a common factor that makes a difference for SMEs. The NESSI
projects have different external industrial advisors groups, which in an equal way,
contributes to fulfill the requirements of the users that they represent. One of these
groups is entirely focused on SME, having the objective to filter that the final results of
the initiative will fit the SMEs, and SMEs clients’ world.
 There is an open invitation to become part in an active community in the world in
building NEXOF, fostering partnerships and international cooperation with significant
industrial and academic participants from multi-disciplinary research. The strategy is
based on open contribution mechanisms which will ensure that NEXOF meets the
requirements of the user community, incorporates the best open technologies, and
triggers research with concrete, applicable results. This process is essential in gaining
wide acceptance and building a very dynamic community that will become an important
part of the open construction process of NESSI (and NEXOF).

Through the participation in the NEXOF initiatives, SMEs will influence and build the
service architecture of the future and give visibility to the results of their research and
development. NEXOF can become a platform that can help SMEs at building and offering
better applications, at opening new business opportunities and also at capturing and voicing
their research needs in software and services and. NEXOF can therefore act as technology
transfer in both ways: from SMEs needs to European research projects and vice versa.

4. Technology Description
NEXOF aims at creating a generic open source platform for creating and delivering
applications not only by the service provider, but also by third parties, enabling the creation
of service based ecosystems. NEXOF harmonizes the effort for defining, designing,
implementing and testing service-oriented software systems for a wide range of industrial
sectors. NEXOF is composed of three core elements:
 NESSI Open Reference Model (ORM): 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 (ORA) addressing definition and selection of
innovative architectural styles and patterns based on the reference model. The 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). The approach is to use patterns, partitioning the domain in a
series of distinct problems and identifying reusable solutions for each. The project has a
parallel focus on the composition of these patterns to create coherent, consistent and
interoperable instances of service-oriented software systems. The reference architecture
will incorporate technology-oriented open specifications through patterns.
 NESSI Open Reference Implementation (ORI) 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.
 open for all to participate.
Using the ORA an expert System
Designer will be able to produce a
Description a specific System
Architecture satisfying requirements
and needs. Then a Service-Based
Software System can be produced
utilizing the proposed ORI or with
another implementation.

The ORA is composed by:

 Guidelines and Principles
 Conceptual model
 Standard Catalogue
 Software Components (building
blocks)
 Architectural/Design Patterns
Figure 2: The NEXOF-RA Paradigm

Every Design Pattern can be composed of Software Components (developed from

scratch or taken from the Standards Catalogue) or other Design Patterns. So it is possible to
move from a Top-level (very abstract) view of the System Architecture to a concrete
Implementation Design (Implementation Design Schema).

5. Developments
The internet of services is becoming a reality where the main players are big companies that
anticipate the possibilities of offering their developments in that way. A well known
example is Google Maps, a service that can be consumed from mobile phones; that can be
embedded into web developments, into desktop developments, etc. This new way of
offering services in a packaged way is being embraced by a crescent number of industrial
sectors and traditional services sectors. The advantages of having a big pool of
interoperable services is easy to understand and be adopted by an SME, as it can access a
big amount of functionalities that can be “mixed” and integrated to compose an application
that is rapidly developed. Of course there are also some drawbacks: complexity of the
levels of services, availability of services, etc.

NEXOF advocates for a holistic view, so that the different parties in the internet of
services will be able of build, aggregate and consume internet services under a framework
that considers the IT services from the different points of view, and not just focusing on
technical problems. At this moment, NEXOF is beginning to be defined; the first releases of
both the Architectural Model and the Reference Architecture are being defined in the EU
Project NESSI-RA, and different test cases and proofs of concepts have been, and are being
launched based on the aspects of the architectural decisions taken.

NEXOF Architecture is not a work started from scratch. Following the NESSI strategy,
currently there are five different EU projects (labelled NESSI Strategic Projects (NSPs)),
that are in tight collaboration with the NEXOF engineering team that and fulfil the NEXOF
Reference Architecture specifications, therefore covering some of the most meaningful
areas & strategic priorities considered in NEXOF. The advantage of having these on-going
NSPs is that they give field to have partial (yet existing) implementations of NEXOF that
anticipate the advantages and features that the final results will have, and that offer a
playground of existing testable, tested, and even industrial deployed solutions packaged,
configurable and ready to use. At this moment, important advances are being developed and
tested in the areas of:
 Visual interface generation from services definition, visual “final user” composition and
orchestration of services, configurable visual consumption of composite services
through mashup techniques and utilization of front-end layer components in a next-
generation, global Service-Oriented Architecture (EzWeb project).
 Monitoring, enforcement, and audit of quantifiable indicators on the security of a
business process, and for provisioning manageable assurance of the security levels, trust
levels and regulatory compliance of highly dynamic service-oriented architectures in
centralised, distributed (multi-domain), and outsourcing context (MASTER project).
 Definition and introduction of a powerful ICT infrastructure for the reliable and
effective delivery of services as utilities to support the setup and deployment of services
on demand, at competitive costs, across disparate administrative domains, while
assuring quality of service (RESERVOIR project).
 Management of service level agreements (SLAs) and to implement an SLA
management framework that can be easily integrated into a service-oriented
infrastructure (SOI) (SLA@SOI project).
 Implementation of a comprehensive framework and infrastructure that integrates four
complimentary and revolutionary technical advances (Web principles, Web 2.0,
Semantic Web, and Context management) into a coherent and domain independent
service delivery platform (SOA4ALL).

NEXOF assures the interoperability and the coexistence of all these developments and
leverages research results and open contributions from the NSPs and any interested party
(research projects/initiatives, organizations, individuals). These interim results will provide
a context for sharing results in implementing NEXOF with appropriate references from
which lessons can be learnt.

6. Results
In terms of NESSI/NEXOF results, it is important to state that the big ITC players are
participating to the initiative, and contributing in a significant manner to achieve the
expected objectives (NEXOF is too ambitious for a company to develop it on its own). This
simple result is very important for SMEs, because SMEs have the opportunities to get profit
of and participate to initiatives that are reinforced by the key players, helping in this way:
 Reduce the SMEs risk perception on adopting, experimenting and/or developing
NEXOF modules alone.
 Reduce the risk of the final user (e.g. ITC SME) when proposing a solution based on
“the internet of services” but under a well specified and defined, common framework.

It is also remarkable that at this moment a different type of results is being produced
inside the NESSI projects, and more specifically in the NEXOF-RA project. The objective
of this project is to deliver the reference architecture specification for NEXOF, but also to
identify the technology gaps identified. This gives SMEs -as entities more specialised and
dynamic- the opportunity to deliver results or participate in projects focused in solving
these gaps that have to be developed.

Apart from that, important results in research and technology transfer are being
achieved under the several ongoing NESSI Strategic Projects. Just as a sample of delivered
results, we can state for the NESSI strategic project EzWeb. EzWeb describes a framework
where services can be defined, composed, and used in a graphical way, allowing building
application user interfaces by the user itself (based in a concept similar to service-widgets).
At this moment EzWeb is being tested at the client departments of Telefónica España,
where the different users have defined their “final user application” based on the problems
that they usually face on a daily basis, as before they had to solve these problems using
different applications (that now have been transformed into services).

Of course this technology is now available for ICT companies as Open Source, and for
an ICT SME trying to convince a client to work in a service oriented way, these kind of
results are very valuable because with very little effort, they can deploy a mix of enterprise
services integrated with others that are available for free (for example embedding Google
Maps and Google Search in a customer management application, so that when the address
is read, it can be located in the map, and searched by Google). In this way a lot of value is
given to the user by a meaningless cost.

What makes NEXOF special is that, at this moment, lots of different and non
compatible services frameworks are being delivered both from commercial parties and open
source communities. For an SME is very difficult to select what is the more appropriate for
its needs, and the current technologies are focused in specific areas of the services world
(execution, deployment, or orchestration) but none of them is offering a global solution
with so important features such as how availability, service levels, etc can be achieved. This
of course generates a big perception of the risk on adopting services oriented strategies,
both for the final client and also for the ICT provider.

This is the area in which NEXOF is beginning to deliver coordinated and complete
results that enable the adoption of the services strategy, softening the bridge towards the
next steps, and providing ICT companies (and specifically SMEs) with a realistic and
compatible framework that will make then to reach the internet of services age, but also that
will boost the SMEs participation on the research and development of the future steps
(internet of the objects, future internet, etc).

Some partial results of these holistic vision of NEXOF can also be accessed through the
test bed cases, and proof on concept developed at NEXOF-RA where they mix different
technologies in an architectural pattern that made them work together.

7. Business Benefits
In order to promote and make real the transformation, NESSI is defined in the context of a
holistic approach to an ecosystem in which all the parties involved coexist and which can
develop into a new economic model. This holistic model embraces the whole service area
(that includes ICT-based SMEs) and foresees NESSI as a key element in the EU economy.
NEXOF will support SMEs in their innovative pursuits, increase the technological content
of their services and boost their competitiveness in a global market. SMEs are invited to
follow up the NEXOF wave to build up competitive advantages for the future.

The SaaS paradigm based on web-based clients mean that a new generation of SMEs
can also compete in bringing software services in this market. In fact the SaaS paradigm is
so open that even start ups can enter this market (e.g. the popular example of YouTube).
With the SaaS paradigm, SMEs will be able to provide high levels of availability and
scalability for their services, unthinkable under former software delivery paradigms. The
NEXOF openness is crucial since with it, the barriers to entry will be lowered giving access
to a large number of smaller players, especially SMEs.
 SMEs can participate as developers (implementing NEXOF-based solutions for third
parties), as users (deploying NEXOF-based solutions), as participants in R&D projects
(bringing new pieces of knowledge to the NEXOF concept).

NEXOF will enable a developer / service provider to offer third parties the development
of applications to be hosted by the service provider, through a rich service platform for
creating, hosting, running and operating “software as a service” (SaaS) applications.
Independent Software Vendors can greatly benefit from the NEXOF SaaS open platform,
by develop high quality instances of NEXOF SaaS platform to commercialise it to SaaS
hosting providers and by transforming their traditional software into SaaS applications that
span across multiple environments and companies and enter into the emerging SaaS market.

End users will benefit from this new software paradigm in which they will not need to
manage and maintain a local infrastructure that is an important burden for many businesses.
With the SaaS paradigm they will just need a group of PCs equipped with browsers and
they will access their applications with a continuous availability and considerably lower
their maintenance cost of local infrastructure. The NEXOF interoperability and coherence
will provide end users with the capability of selecting the services they need from a variety
of players while, at the same time, keeping their costs under control and decreasing the
burden of maintaining and evolving their software and hardware environments. The focus
of NEXOF on safety and security will provide end users with the required levels of privacy
and protection provided as built-in qualities.

NEXOF will allow the creation of effective trans-national networks of technology-

based SMEs having similar or complementary needs and the networking with other active
players in the RTD (such as technology platforms) and will also allow the development of
competitive advantage through combining strengths with other firms. International co-
operation represents an important dimension for the NEXOF project, enabling to access
knowledge, skills, technology and facilities available within the EU and exploring mutual
benefits of the co-operation and increase access to market opportunities.

By introducing knowledge derived from EU projects, NEXOF will finally help SMEs at
improving their corporative image and their credibility in front of customers and partners.

8. Conclusions
In this paper we have presented NEXOF, a coherent and consistent open service framework
leveraging research in the area of service-based systems. We have described how ICT-
based SMEs can make benefit of the adoption of NEXOF features. NEXOF provides the
platform to capture SMEs research needs and also the platform to help SMEs at improving
and boosting their businesses in a wide range of industrial and service sectors.

Since the NEXOF framework will be promoted and used in significant industrial
deployments, it gives visibility and impact to the contributions of SMEs. All contributors
will gain expertise on NEXOF, which will be a key asset once the framework is deployed.
Significant contributors will be recognized as co-authors.

References
[1] NESSI Strategic Research Agenda, Vol. 3.FP7-2.exec, Public -Version 29 February 2008 – Revision .01
[2] NESSI Open Reference Model (ORM) - http://www.nexof-ra.eu/
[3] NESSI Open Reference Architecture (ORA) - http://www.nexof-ra.eu/