d6.10 - recommendations and evolutionary paths to...

IP CASCADAS “Component-ware for Autonomic, Situation-aware Communications, And Dynamically Adaptable Services” "

D6.10

Bringing Autonomic Services to Life

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D6.10 - Recommendations and evolutionary paths to future SAC services

Status and Version: Final version

Date of issue: 26th January, 2009

Distribution: Public

Author(s): Name Partner

Paola Fantini MIP

Claudio Palasciano MIP

Franco Zambonelli UNIMORE

Antonio Manzalini TELECOM ITALIA

Checked by: Corrado Moiso TELECOM ITALIA

Abstract This Deliverables reports an overview of recommendations and evolutionary paths to future SAC services scenarios. Attention has been focussed on drivers and scenarios of future Telecommunications and Internet, by identifying new potential roles and business models.


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Table of Content 1 Introduction 3

1.1 Reference 3 1.2 Document History 4

2 Evolution of Telecommunications, ICT and Internet 5 3 Impact of CASCADAS Paradigms 9 4 Future Application scenarios 12 5 Future value networks 14 Evolutionary path for future SAC services 20 6 Recommendations for fostering autonomic ecosystems 24 7 Conclusions 27


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1 Introduction

This Deliverables reports an overview of recommendations and evolutionary paths to future SAC services scenarios. Attention has been focussed on drivers and scenarios of future Telecommunications and Internet, by identifying new potential roles and business models.

1.1 Reference [0] Heylighen, ‘Principia Cybernetica Web’, pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SELFORG.html, 1997.

[1] Porter M.E., ‘Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance’, Free Press, 1985.

[2] Coase R.H., ‘The firm, the market, and the law’, University of Chicago Press, 1988.

[3] Li F., Whalley J., ‘Deconstruction of the telecommunications industry: from value chains to value networks’, Telecommunication Policies, 2002, 9, 1-22.

[4] Benkler Y., ‘Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production’, Yale Law Journal 273, 2004.

[5] Hoeg, Martignoni, Meckel, Stanoevska, Slabeva, ‘Overview of business models for Web 2.0 communities’, GeNeMe2006 workshop on Virtuelle Organization und Neue Medien, 2006.

[6] Strahilevitz L.J., ‘Wealth Without Markets?’, Yale University Press, 2006.

[7] Slot M., Fissen V., ‘Users In The 'Golden' Age Of The Information Society’, Observatorio (OBS*) Journal, 3, 2007.

[8] Parker G.G., Van Alstyne M.W., ‘Two-Sided Network Effects: A Theory of Information Product Design’, Management Science Vol. 51, No. 10, October 2005.

[9] Rochet J., Tirole J., ‘Two side markets, an overview’, http://www.idei.asso.fr, 2004.

[10] Toffler A., ‘The Third Wave’, Bantam, 1980.

[11] CASCADAS D6.8, ‘Assessment Studies on the communication paradigms developed within CASCADAS’, 2008.

[12] Bruns A., ‘Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation’, in Proceedings Creativity & Cognition’ 6, 2007.

[13] CASCADAS D6.6, ‘Organizational model for new communication paradigms (2nd release)’, 2008.

[14] European Commission, ‘Digital Business Ecosystems’, Official Publications of the European Communities, 2007.

[15] Rogers E. M., ‘Diffusion of innovations (5th ed.)’, New York, Free Press, 2003.

[16] Moore G. A., ‘Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers’, Harper Business Essentials, 1991, revised 1999.

[17] Leguay J., Lindgren A., Scott J., Friedman T., Crowcroft J., ‘Opportunistic Content Distribution in an Urban Setting’, SIGCOMM’06 Workshops, September 2006.

[18] Ott J., Pitkanen M. ‘DTN-based content storage and retrieval’, IEEE WoWMoM Workshop on Autonomic and Opportunistic Communications, Helsinki, June 2007.


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1.2 Document History

Version Date Authors Comment

0.1 October, 9th 2008 Paola Fantini

Claudio Palasciano

Initial ToC

0.2 October, 10th 2008 Antonio Manzalini Revision of ToC and distribution of work

0.3 October, 14th 2008 Antonio Manzalini Starting contributions

0.4 December, 11th, 2008 Paola Fantini Contributions to sections 5 6

0.5 December 11th 2008 Franco Zambonelli

Revision of section 2

0.6 January, 13th 2009 Paola Fantini

Claudio Palasciano

Contributions to sections 5 6 7


Claudio Palasciano

Revision of ToC and contribution on 5 6 7 8


Claudio Palasciano

Revision of sections 5 6 7 8


Claudio Palasciano

Revision of section 5

Final version January, 26th 2009 Antonio Manzalini, Corrado Moiso

Final integration and quality check


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2 Evolution of Telecommunications, ICT and Internet

In its 2001 Manifesto on Autonomic Computing, researchers at IBM observed that the main obstacles to further progress in the IT industry are systems heterogeneity and software complexity. These tend to dramatically increase management and configuration costs, calling for novel “autonomic” management approached that, by leaving humans out-of-the-loop via self-management solutions, could notably decrease management and configuration costs. Very similar considerations could be actually made with regard to Telecommunication networks, the Internet, and its services.

Telecommunications *networks of networks* are increasingly requiring solutions for self-management and self-configuration of resources and services, due to their complexity and heterogeneity. Moreover the higher and higher dynamics of the networks (as caused, e.g., by the advent of the mobile era) are enforcing strict requirements of adaptability that in turn result in further complexities. Advanced architectures of Autonomic Computing and Communications (e.g., event handling, probabilistic automata) as well as innovative solutions (e.g., bio-inspired, game theory, etc) are promising areas of long term research for finding solutions meeting above requirements. These problems are further exacerbated by the fact that the traditionally separated words of Telecom and of the Internet/Web are de facto converging, such that it becomes impossible to confine problems and to identify independent solutions.

To better capture these concepts, let’s have a look in more details at the Telecommunications, ICT and Internet today contexts; there, three major trends are clearly emerging: Web2.0, Telco2.0 and the strategic research for the Future Internet.

The evolution of Internet and Web application towards the so-called Web2.0, based on an architecture of participation, is gaining more and more attention. The basic idea is that of using the web-as-a-platform” for providing dynamic services (even in perpetual beta), enabling prosumption (Users’ can contribute content and services) and diversity (to accommodate the long tail of the market) with alternative business models (e.g., forms of adaptive advertisements). All of which likely to be further enriched in the near future by the incoming semantic revolution, aka Web 3.0.

In parallel to the Web 2.0 trend, the Telecom arena is focusing on the so-called Telco2.0 revolution, where the idea is trying to apply Web2.0 principles to Telecommunications, (e.g., SDK) for enabling User-generated services. Final goal is exposing and mashing up TLC-ICT network capabilities, service components, data, etc., in order to *open* to new service and business models (e.g., based on Telco and Application Providers federations). For instance, Virtualization, Network Computer, Cloud Computing are keywords under the spot for future evolutions.

This said, it is rather clear that some innovative and flexible framework will be needed to facilitate the Web and Telecom integration, and in particular the integration of traditional Telco and Web services and the possibility of opening it to prosumption and diversity. However, an additional factor has to account for when thinking at such innovative framework, i.e., the increasing diffusion of pervasive devices and the need for their integration in modern service and data frameworks, a phenomenon which is often characterized as the emergence of the “Internet of Things”.

In the Internet of Things vision, RFID tags and alike will be attached to every, even small, objects and locations, carrying on digital information about such objects/location and enabling us to store and access in them additional digital information about. In addition, wireless sensor networks, there included camera networks, will be distributed around in our cities, houses, and offices, to monitor specific physical phenomena, and possibly to


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perform actuating actions in the physical world. Devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, GPS and other localization devices, are increasingly able to produce and store notable amounts of data related to our personal, social and professional activities. All of these will lead to the emergence of a comprehensive, integrated, and very dense, decentralized infrastructure for the provisioning of innovative Telco/Web services. At the user level, the infrastructure can be used to access (e.g., via PDAs and on the move) innovative services for better perceiving/interacting with the surrounding physical world and the social activities occurring in it, and for acting on it. In addition, the infrastructure will be used as a way to enrich more traditional classes of digital services with the capability of dynamically and autonomously adapting their behaviour to the context (spatial and/or social) in which they are invoked and exploited.

Thus, a framework for next generation Telco/Web services should be able not only to facilitate integration, prosumption, diversity, but should also be able to integrate a variety of diverse pervasive devices into a single coherent picture, so as to eventually promote the production and delivery of innovative services for the Internet of Things, capable of adapting their behaviour to the users and to the surrounding physical environment.

In this evolving scenario, every major Player wants to create a new framework for Web2.0, Telco2.0 and Future Internet evolutionary trends we have just outlined. Nevertheless, considering the state of the art, some important constraints have held back such frameworks as it seems they are still lacking those features meeting some common key requirements of the above trends. These include the capability for the framework and its services of:

• self-evolving and self-adapting to changing conditions, at both the hardware and user level;

• self-configuring with limited human intervention;

• self-protecting from failures and security attacks;

• self-optimizing to allow resources (including energy) savings, and performance improvements (e.g., load balancing, QoS parameters);

• self-aggregate/organize for creating overlay networks for component cooperation, and dynamic resource allocation;

• attracting mass of applications Users and Developers;

• being governed by rules making them sustainable.

A technology breakthrough is required allowing to develop “complex and adaptive” frameworks meeting all the above requirements whilst enhancing (or at least maintaining) performance, reliability and reaction times typical of current traditional systems. Such technology breakthrough, supported by complex systems engineering, is expected to enable new business ecosystems for Telecommunications, ICT and Internet evolutions.

The Vision motivating CASCADAS as well as other more recent projects and initiatives in the area is that all *resources* in Telecommunications *networks of networks* are to be abstracted through *autonomic clouds of components* (whether such components refer to pervasive devices, autonomous systems, data items, services, or generic resources), able to interact with each other and self-organize/self-aggregate for producing, consuming and managing services, data and resources (see also Figure 1). In other words, such autonomic components will be pervasively distributed in *networks of networks* (e.g., in Users’ devices, nodes, servers, sensors, etc) to create an innovative Telecommunications “Ecosystem”.


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Figure 1 – Towards Ecosystems of components

The introduction of Autonomic capabilities and Self-organization (as reified by an infrastructure relying on a conceptual eco-inspired architecture of components) might represent an interesting area of innovation for creating a Telecommunications Ecosystem framework. Self-organization can be generally defined as “a process where the organization (constraint, redundancy) of a system spontaneously increases, i.e., without this increase being controlled by the environment or an encompassing or otherwise external system” [0]. In future Telecommunications Ecosystem, self-organization will be a basic requirement for handling scalability, resilience and highly dynamic connection of resources, and ownership costs, other than for enabling dealing with adaptivity and pervasiveness. As a matter of fact, networks of networks may scale unpredictably in number of nodes, users, and load. Level of scalability results in an increased probability of failures, which in turns requires self-maintenance and self-repair of the systems. At the same time, adaptation is required to handle connections changes caused by nodes connecting and disconnecting from the systems (e.g., high churn rate in wireless networks). Finally, distributions and complexity of architectures require self-management solutions for hiding complications to human operators and ownership costs. Above, self-* capabilities can be designed and deployed introducing autonomic capabilities into the nodes.

From a more “software engineering” viewpoint, and considering that applications could be viewed as interconnected aggregations of interacting logic, such schema (aggregations, patterns) could be initially driven with a top-down goal-directed approach, e.g., through assigning goals to components. Goals, to be reached by plans, can be fragmented into multiple sub-goals to parallelize execution or achieve partial results. Plan selection can be directly influenced interaction communications (e.g., events) with other nodes (or aggregations of nodes). Adopting this approach, Telco services could be seen as *living entities* that may alter or evolve their offered capabilities according to bio-inspired and evolutionary algorithms.

Along these lines, the main areas of RTD for Telecommunications (intended according to the Telco/Web convergence vision) evolutions can include:

• overcoming limitations of current service frameworks and underlying software solutions of Telecommunications, ICT and Internet (currently static, brittle and insecure) with an innovative dynamic, adaptive and pervasive framework that can facilitate the processes of networking service creation, execution and management. This innovation can also well pave the way for emerging pervasive and ubiquitous computing scenarios;

• defining an innovative, goal-oriented approach (possibly enriched with semantics descriptions and reasoning) for decentralized adaptive self-composition of data,


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knowledge and services, going beyond modern methods based on semantic match-making between services. These autonomic features could be exploited through situational context-dependent learning and goal-oriented knowledge reasoning based on ontologically-grounded data semantics;

• finding an innovative solutions for the optimization of resource usage in a distributed networked framework.

One of the most serious technological challenges of future Telecommunications, ICT and Internet will be interconnection and management of huge amounts of small devices tied together in networks of networks. On the one hand there are traditional approaches aimed at engineering proper network or application protocols to face such challenges, on the other hand there are innovative investigations, as proposed in this paper, based on distributed middleware with autonomic self-organization features.

From an engineering viewpoint, it should be mentioned that a trade-off is required between Top-Down (TD) design (policies, high level rules, orchestration) and Bottom-Up (BU) self-Organization of components (based on simple local rules and distributed algorithms). This is shown in figure 2.

Figure 2 - Top-down vs. bottom-up design

Instead of making a top-down *mapping of goals into agents* (as in Multi Agent Systems approaches or in SOA orchestration with dynamic binding), engineering self-organization should be carried out in three main steps:

• applying a traditional top-down design of the overall framework mapping from goals into (aggregation of) high level components interacting each other (according to certain algorithms);

• modelling lower level component behaviours and controlling their aggregation with self-organization algorithms (simple local rules) allowing bottom-up emergence, for example, of data patterns;

Continuous matching TD and BU patterns (in order to achieve global goals) thus *designing by variation* final local rules and component behaviours to achievable goals.


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3 Impact of CASCADAS Paradigms

CASCADAS vision enters this evolutionary scenario of Telecommunications, ICT and Internet by proposing a new approach to manage complexities of service networks: creating an ecosystem whose atomic building block is the Autonomic Communication Element (ACE) abstraction.

In this direction, CASCADAS is proving a robust and dynamic modular conceptual framework for building autonomic, self-organizing, semantic services, and act as high-level reference model for the production of a new generation of programmable communication elements that can be reused at different stack levels. Such component model forms the ACE basic abstraction.

CASCADAS vision is based on a set of complementary founding features that starts from state-of-the-art f modern distributed computing and communication systems, for advancing towards autonomic and situation-aware communication services: context-awareness becomes situation-awareness; self-organization and self-adaptation converge into a concept of semantic self-organization; scalability assumes the form of self-similarity; modularity takes the form of a new autonomic component-ware paradigm that intrinsically features self-CHOP1 capabilities.

ACEs are characterised by autonomic features such as self-awareness, semantic self-organisation and self-healing, and allow creating and executing dynamically adaptable situation-aware services. The ACE component model is conceived around the notion of organ. Name derives by human organs, which are capable of self-adapting to the conditions of the whole body. In a similar way, ACE’s organs are capable of adapting their own execution to the general conditions.

ACEs’ behaviour is contained in its self model, initially created by the developer but capable of being modified autonomously by the ACE itself based on self-awareness information, formed, in turn, by one or more plans that characterize the behaviour and the services offered by the ACE.

CASCADAS Framework is contained in an open source toolkit for situated autonomic communications, also briefly called the CASCADAS Toolkit or the Toolkit. Through the Java programming language used for development, the Toolkit provides a run-time environment capable of supporting ACEs in all their features, i.e., self-awareness, life-cycle management, interaction with other ACEs and integration of legacy code, while also incorporating, libraries for advanced mechanisms for pervasive supervision, ACE aggregation, management of social knowledge, and security. An underlying unified execution environment provides everything necessary to create, execute, and deploy ACEs.

Given that, impact of the CASCADAS framework on future Telecommunications, ICT and Internet evolutions can be characterized and evaluated by the following features:

1 Self-CHOP stands for Self-Configuration, Self-Healing; Self-Optimization; Self-Protection.


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Features Description

Goal-orientation Goal-oriented approach for component interaction (and composition) including the necessary formalisms for goal, plan, semantic matching and task specification.

Components Interactions

Interactions through a dynamic overlay with tuples exchanges. Poll when idle approach to provide scalability through altruistic behaviour.

Decentralized Execution environment

Decentralized deployment, execution and life-cycle support for software components. Life-cycle support includes, for example, host resource provisioning, failover replication, migration, etc.

Distributed and collaborative Distributed collaboration (and negotiation) between components to perform shared tasks.

Decentralised algorithms for self-organisation

The dynamic and automatic assembly of components required to accomplish a given task or set of tasks according to component-local rules and behaviours.

Self-management

Behavioural self-regulation of computationally capable entities including the use of feedback loops to enable self-adaptation according to detected events, constraints and resource availability; self-optimization to optimize the behaviour of components, and self-healing compensate for change and failures.

Dependability Self-monitoring and reactive/predictive mechanisms to ensure dependable operation and zero-deviance from expected behaviour.

Security, Trust and reputation.

Support for at least authentication and authorization regarding the use of components. Integration of trust and reputation solutions.

Resource awareness

Sensitivity to resource scarcity in terms of proficient and optimised use, with a specific focus on the prudent use of energy to ensure long-term sustainability.

Ontologies Support for ontologies describing components (services, data, etc.) and their inter-relationships, thus serving as the grounding for semantic-reasoning and planning.

Semantic Self-Composition

Automatic and dynamic self-composition of distributed components as the basis for transient, evolving distributed software applications which can automatically coalesce according to ‘semantic matching’.

Policies

Governance of general and specific behaviour (i.e., at different levels of system granularity), using natural language policy expressions. Policies can be used, for example, to guide the continuous optimization of on-demand (re-) allocation of resources in accordance with prosumer demand.

Interoperability

Openness to support for integration and inter-working with existing third-party technologies and systems, including those associated with the existing infrastructures. Open APIs for the development of components and the integration of existing business and computational entities.

From an industrial perspective, future network infrastructures should be able to provide Users and Application Developers (at different levels, e.g., residential Users but also SME, LE, ASP/Web (2.0) Service Providers, ISP, Content Providers, etc.) with the most appropriate “service environment” according to their context and specific needs. As a matter of fact, future communication and content media services are expected to be become more and more personalized for Customers, and accessible through heterogeneous devices, whilst at the same time network resources need to be used in an optimal way, to reduce Network Operators’ and Service Providers’ costs (CAPEX and OPEX). Current service and network architectures do not support this vision and this represent a strong limitation for the socio-economic evolution of Information Society in Europe: research and development in this area are highly required.


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For Network Providers, one of the most serious technological challenges will be the network capability of interconnecting and managing huge amounts of heterogeneous systems and small devices (tied together in networks-of-networks) capable of serving upper service/application layers in an optimal way; in other words, major drivers include handling effectively network complexity, optimizing resources/costs, and offering basic capabilities for service execution and service networking.

On the other hand, global Service Providers have the challenge of developing “service environment” capable of facing the competition (or better integrating) with the so-called “architecture of participation” of Web2.0 Providers (e.g., Yahoo!, Google). Challenge, in this case, is the development of innovative “service ecosystems” in terms of overlay networks laying over an optimized underling networking/servicing infrastructure. This is offering well-known advantages (e.g., service resource optimization, fault tolerance, adaptation to service load, distribution of the control, scalability, etc.) and potentially opening new business models.

CASCADAS is impacting these challenges providing technical background and preliminary proof-of-concepts for an autonomic service ecosystem that are expected to be valuable on one side for Network and Service Providers and, on the other side, Applications Developers and Final Users.


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4 Future Application scenarios

An interesting scenario is the so-called cyber-marketplace, where individuals (e.g. Prosumers), Developers, SMEs, LEs, Telcos, Web Providers, Application and Info Providers, etc. can connect and interact, in a secure and reliable way, for selling, buying, negotiating, exchanging and trading any contents, information and services, including Telco-ICT services (some services are in turn also built-in into the framework to improve Users’ confidence; to preserve and protect the market, to make it more adaptive and dynamic, etc.).

Cyber-marketplace can also be used for trading goods (for example as a possible long-term evolution of current marketplace, e.g., e-Bay, where Telco-ICT services are fully integrated to complement the effectiveness of the platform).

Let’s consider the example of eBay (funded in 1995). The online auction environment has been created as virtual marketplace for buying and selling products, goods, etc. for and by people, individuals. eBay mission was to enter the business of connecting people, beyond the simple model of selling products to them. As a matter of fact eBay has been developed as a person-to-person marketplace on the Internet, where sellers list items for sale and interested buyers bid on these items. eBay success is well known: today eBay visitors make about 350 millions searches a day on the site.

As a matter of fact such business model has intrinsic potentialities of going far beyond a simple marketplace for buying and selling products, goods, etc. For example, some Voice Providers are considering selling content (e.g., ring-tones, avatars, etc.) and creating PayPal-powered Wallet that would let a User to order (and pay) for any products and/or services. Even beyond e-commerce and telephony, there are limitless opportunities in a large person-to-person network on the Internet, which could mean the largest network for sharing any kind of information, or a world-wide cloud computing facility.

For example, most interesting is that identity management, reputation systems, PayPal's-like wallet, and Telco enablers (e.g., presence) each could be decoupled from their respective services and offered as components of entirely new kinds of services (they could become the building blocks for a more customized service environment).

In general, the novelty of the use-case consists in creating a real “open” environment based on software solutions for trading any goods, services, digital information and contents. By placing heavy emphasis on component-ware software, this will encourage developers (and/or prosumers) to create software modules that can be openly shared with other developers (and/or prosumers) and reused across applications.

A second example of application scenario is exploiting the opportunity for Users to browse any object in the environment they live. In other words, considering the evolution of RFID tagging, let’s think about the possibility of using any object (we normally encounter in our day life) as a pointer to pieces of data, information and services.

This scenario will see a dramatic increase of the data clouds already overlooking our life. A tuple space of data and information might be queried to extract higher-level information, knowledge and services.

In this scenario, a bottom-up self-organization of components (wrapping recursively any pieces of data) will be able to provide a more effective way to aggregate coherent data structures to be served to services and applications. On the other hand, a top-down orchestration of service components will enable proper composition for providing services and applications (using those structured data).


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A third example of interesting application scenario, at infrastructural level, addresses the possibility to exploit bottom-up aggregation for self-organizing “workers” offering computing and storage capabilities, such as the ones described in [10], in order to provide a scalable and robust distributed platform for execution of tasks generated by the orchestrators. Self-organization algorithm can optimize the patterns and interconnections of such workers in a way to optimize the distribution of load according to the deployment of task processing logic and data allocation.


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5 Future value networks

Previous sections have elaborated how CASCADAS vision and achievements fit in and may impact the evolutionary path of the Telecommunication, ICT and internet.

In particular, previous analysis has described some future potential scenarios, enabled and fostered by CASCADAS; particular attention has been focussed on the “cyber-marketplace’, scenario. This aims at giving a first perspective of the possible complexity of the future business context, in which goods, services and information will be traded/shared among business companies and individuals (consumers and/or prosumers), with the support of a technology framework that facilitates person-to-person collaboration / machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and enables virtualization of computing and network resources.

In this section, a deeper analysis of the depicted frameworks and scenarios will be performed, in order to single out the main elements of the future business context which will evolve into new potential value networks.

For the purpose of this section, we need a more extended definition of the future business context, taking on account that:

• value chains are becoming value networks, with the inclusion of a wider range of actors and roles, such as stake-holders, individuals, etc.

• the concept of value and of economic revenues needs to be enriched in order to gain a more complete view of the relationships among the future network actors;

• ICT are pervasive: they both enable and are impacted by emerging social and economic behaviour.

Concerning the evolution of the business value chains, the concept of value networks originates from the Value Chain Analysis framework introduced by Michael Porter in his book ‘Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance’ [1], in which all activities of a business organization (such as inbound logistics, operations/production, marketing & sales, etc) are analysed in order to assess the value they add to the organization products or services.

Afterwards, Porter’s analysis framework has been extended beyond the organization boundaries, extending the internal business value chain to the whole supply chain and the distribution networks. Companies in recent years have realized the need to react quickly to new threats and opportunities emerging in the relevant environment. They have learnt to set up a constant monitoring activity, in order to anticipate changes. Organizational units boundaries have faded, while business processes and related key performance indicators, shared along the supply chains, have become the pillars to build effective communication and to achieve holistic behaviour. Operations and organizational systems have become more fluid, so that changes can be adopted and integrated among different organizations with limited lead time and cost.

One of the main reasons for this evolution, as for the economic literature [2], is related to the decreasing of the transaction costs connected to the supplier-producer relationships. Business companies have been deciding to outsource more and more tasks in their value chains as long as the related transaction costs have been lowering and, in general, the fact that, due to legal, political, technological and social factors, dealing with providers, vendors, partners and other players in the marketplace has become easier. As already mentioned, traditional value chains have split into open value networks.


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This phenomenon has affected a great variety of industries, including in particular the telecommunication sector, where a so-called deconstruction process has been running: as Feng Li and Jason Whalley have pointed out: “The Telco value chains are rapidly evolving into value networks, with multiple entry and exit points, creating enormous complexity for all the players involved” [3].

Furthermore, companies have learnt not only to integrate value networks with their business partners, but to broaden the arena to reach society. In order to catch the business opportunities coming from the Web 2.0 and in general from the post-industrial models related the informational nature of the products that are now catching up, firms have learnt to exploit ideas, knowledge and developments coming from customers, experts and amateurs.

Concerning the new ‘open’ ways in which the business relationship are taking shape, as Yochai Benkler as highlighted [4], some tasks can performed outside the boundaries of firms, not only on the basis of a classical value-for-money model, but following the model of the ‘so called’ economics of sharing. In this model, sharing can occur if a good is shareable, according to certain characteristics, and there is for it excess capacity: this without a specific agreement for a quid-pro-quo, depending on reduced transaction cost and related motivation.

Recently, the concepts of excess capacity, social production and sharing have been used to explain the rise and success of non-market production, especially the informational one, such as that the one within the web 2.0 phenomenon, in which actor’s motivations are closely connected to the social ‘altruism’ that characterizes the web communities.

As per Hoeg et al. [5], the participants in Open Source communities invest time and knowledge for the sake of the community. In return, they earn respect and reputation (e.g., positive feedback from the peer group) as well as taking knowledge out of the community knowledge base. Although intangible, these benefits might be exploited in their professional activities.

Along with this trend toward social collaboration and trust, in the future value networks we should also take into account that, however, as underlined by L.J. Strahilevitz in his ‘Wealth without markets?’ [6]: “Whenever social production creates a valuable resource that large numbers of citizens want to use, that resource becomes an attractive target for the mischief-maker, proprietary competitors, free-riders, sketchy opportunists, and well-meaning dolts whose arrival can drive away the co-operators who built the successful network.”

This dynamic interleaving between cooperation and opportunism will constitute another additional complexity factor for the future business context, where business players will try to exploit opportunities and value created by social production while, possibly, aiming at integrating even the disrupters into their business models and vice-versa.

In the above perspective, value is pervasively created. Delivery of value is composed dynamically in various, and maybe overlapping paths, along with new ways of value exchange. Value networks spray into the complex dynamically-changing value grids that will constitute the future business contexts.

In the possible future scenarios all actors (individual, SMEs and large companies, public bodies) will potentially perform the whole product/service lifecycle and related roles/activities, which can be divided in four categories and sub-types, adapted from [7] (see following figure):

1. Design (create, reuse, transform);


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2. Support (facilitate, communicate):

3. Sell-Share (purchase, acquire);

4. Consume.

Figure 3 - Product/service lifecycle and related roles/activities

In particular, some prospective key roles will have important impacts in the future networks:

1. market intermediaries in ‘ two-sided’ markets;

2. prosumers/produsers.

Two-sided markets (e.g. [8] and [9]) are economic networks in which one actor, namely, the ‘intermediary’, provides a ‘market platform’ for two other actors (we can call them ‘seller’ and ‘buyer’) by which they can share an economic relationship. The key issue of this business model is that the intermediary acts an enabling role for the economic exchange between the ‘seller’ and ‘buyer’, exchange that, without the intermediary action, possibly would not have taken place. Leveraging on the business opportunities offered to the other two actors, at the same time, the intermediary, so to say, creates a new market for itself, targeted to the other two actors. In order to avoid the classical chicken-and-egg loop, the intermediary can provide the platform for free, at least initially, to one of the two actors, while applying fees to the other. A free-to-air TV broadcaster is an example of a two-sided MKT intermediary. The TV broadcaster sells free-to air TV programs (the two-sided ‘market platform’) to consumers in order to provide enough audience to business advertisers that pay the full cost of the ‘market platform’.


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Figure 4 - Actors involved in a two-sided market and their relationships

The term prosumer has been first devised by futurist Alvin Toffler in his book ‘The Third Wave’ [10]: the word stands most likely for ‘producer-consumer’ or ‘proactive consumer’, definition that perfectly fits with the multi-faceted role that we have depicted in the previous documents of this tasks (see, for instance D6.8 [11]). Another prospective key role in the future value networks is a possible evolution of the prosumer: the ‘produser’. Bruns [12] notes that the prosumer model, while depicting a more informed customer, that is able to build value on top of existing products/services, or, even, to participate in the creation of new products/services with their expert ideas, still relies on a traditional ‘industrial’ value chain (produce-distribute-consume). According to Bruns, a new role can be identified as more and more important in the future business contexts: the produser, which is an economic actor that is involved both in production and usage of a product. Example of produsers can be found in user-led creation of contents such as Open Source software development, in which participants in the OS community are, at the same time, developers/testers and final users.

To summarize, in the future value grids the relationships between all actors are becoming more and more complex and dynamic: new value is created together by new ways of exchanging goods, information, services, knowledge, thus enabling new streams of reward (money, reputation or other intangible benefits).

On the one hand, supply chain collaboration and co-design are increasingly reinforcing the connections between business entities, and, accordingly, the boundaries between suppliers and companies are becoming more and more blurred.

On the other hand, boundaries between business companies and customers/prosumers are becoming thinner and thinner. Customers are becoming not only prosumers, but ‘produsers’, that act both as consumer and production force of the product/service addressed.

In the following picture is shown a schematic comparison between the roles of the actors in the traditional supply chains and the possible interleaved and overlapping roles in the future value grids. Knowledge/information exchange between business partners on the one hand and business with prosumers/producers communities on the other hand will enable new possible need for all actors and therefore new possible value propositions aimed at providing them products and services.


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Figure 5 - Schematic comparison between the roles of the actors in the traditional supply

chains and the possible interleaved and overlapping roles in the future value grids

As stated at the beginning of this section, ICTs play a central role in these trends. The information and telecommunication industry, and the Internet in particular, have lowered the transaction costs, have connected people crossing boundaries (national, business, corporate, etc.) and are bridging gaps (social, generation, etc.). Furthermore, ICTs have empowered human control on the physical word, connecting sensors, computing resources and actuators, including the Internet of Things. As a matter of fact, ICTs themselves have enabled the above mentioned innovation phenomena.

On the other hand, this novel extended value networks corresponds to different usage patterns of the existing infrastructure. The connection is more and more pervasive: is any time (always on), is in mobility (Mobile web). The connection speed is growing fast (broadband, ultra broadband). Traffic increases, including voice, data, and more and more digital content (music, images and video both in download and streaming).

In turn, centrality of cooperation (Collaborative Space) and sharing of economic transactions (Social Economy) increase peer to peer (P2P) communication. One of the key issues in this regard is that P2P networks have become ‘intermittent’ and ‘partially connected’, in the sense that end to end communication must be ensured even if data-sources and data-relay nodes go in and out from the network, with any single node connected only to its neighbours. Networks are no longer static and predictable: they are dynamically evolving, so to say, at ‘runtime’.

Moreover, together with this intrinsic ‘short-term’ dynamicity, the complexity of the architectures is increasing depending on the high innovation and growing rate of devices, networks and communication system.

Further to that, traditional architectures and protocols are pushed to their limits. Needs for higher security, accountability privacy, QoS are still unsatisfied. New pervasive and trustworthy Network and Services Infrastructures and communication paradigms are required.

Research is ongoing toward a new Future Internet that meets above mentioned needs, in particular regarding the Internet Protocol (IP), now the primary means of providing services, applications and content. A new more powerful IP version needs to be


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implemented. This will extend the available number of IP addresses considerably and will allow more novel applications based on heterogeneous technologies (fixed/mobile, wired/wireless), which will expand broadband connectivity to include new mobile devices, enabling ubiquitous usage.

Another interesting research field concerns the P2P networking: researches, including CASCADAS project itself, are aiming at getting through the limitations of the current architectural and algorithmic solutions, in particular the large overhead in terms of dissemination of information needed to handle the above mentioned dynamicity requirements. Two main problems are to be faced: the connection time between nodes may not be enough to allow transfer of large amount of data and, when a request arrives to the information-provider node, maybe the path between the requestor and the provider does no longer exist (see, for instance, [17], [18]).

To summarize, ICT enables new and emerging behaviours that, in turn, create need for more and more sophisticated technical solutions and architectural approaches.


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Evolutionary path for future SAC services

In order to draw a path for the evolution of the future Situated Autonomic Communication (SAC) services, it is worthwhile here to deal with the process of value delivery in the future value grids, initially referring to the well-known business model framework.

As addressed in D6.6 [13], a business model describes how businesses can find a sustainable position within the economy and generate revenues offering ‘value’ to their customers.

Applying this model to the possible business context addressed in the previous section, Autonomic Communication Technology (ACT) will have to dynamically co-evolve together with all actors in the future value grids in their complex and fast changing roles, offering them ‘added value’ while generating value for individuals and sustainable revenue streams for the companies adopting it.

The adoption of ACT not only will provide a traditional support in terms of smarter applications/services and more performing communication infrastructure: ACT potentials will enable new application/service Life-cycles and new ways of managing the convergent and more and more complex ICT-Telco architecture, thus delivering added value for the direct ACT users (possibly prosumers, Telco, Web operators, ICT and Consumer Electronics companies) in the future value grids. This ACT enabled added value, in turn, will generate value for all actors in the whole future business contexts: new services - and maybe products - will be possible, not even imaginable before (see figure 6).

Figure 6 – ACT Value delivery process in the future value grids

The value generated in the grid can be classified as follows:

• financial account: expected business revenues and expenditures;

• user/consumer account: net benefits to users and direct beneficiaries;


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• economic development account: amount of income and employment (incremental effects) that is likely to be generated and relevant significance on the regional economy;

• social account: significant community and social impacts (externalities).

As evidenced in this task’s previous analysis, (D6.6 [13]) the main business actors that might be directly impacted by ACT (such as Telco, Web operators, ICT and, maybe, Consumer Electronics companies) have strong motivations to strike up partnerships together, in order to maintain their competitive edge and increase their business and revenues. Telco operators have the strongest: convergence between Telco and CE/ICT sector might be one of the most promising opportunities to revamp the saturated TLC market.

We can therefore imagine that Telco, ICT/CE and Web operators might become sponsors of the ACT paradigm in its evolutionary path, in particular with Telco taking up the leading role, as ACT potential benefits perfectly match Telco competitive strategies.

Moreover, we can imagine that one of the partner companies sponsoring ACT, maybe a Telco or Web operator, could also be a ‘2-side MKT intermediary’ in the sense evidenced in previous section. In this regard, the ‘2-side MKT intermediary’ partner may adopt the AC technology and exploit its potentials building up and delivering an AC enhanced ‘platform’, by which they will be able to facilitate the creation of new business relationship involving third parties. These third parties, in turn, will find new business opportunities, while, at the same time, will adopt the ACT technology, thus avoiding the ‘chicken-and-egg’ problem of generating and sustaining the demand for AC technology and services.

In this line of reasoning, we can identify three possible delivery channels for ACT added value to final users, maybe with a potential ‘leadership’ of Telco operators and/or of the ‘2-side MKT intermediary’ (see following figure 7):

1. direct provision of ACT framework for development and execution of AC enhanced services/applications;

2. provision of ACT technology know-how and framework to Telco and ICT/Web actors (one of which could also be a ‘2-side MKT intermediary’), in order to allow them to provide AC enhanced applications and services;

3. provision of ACT technology framework to Consumer Electronics companies, enabling newly AC enhanced embedded systems, thus fostering the new opportunities related to the future Internet of Things.

Figure 7 - Three possible delivery channels for ACT added value to final users


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According to the technology adoption life cycle ([15] and also D6.6 [13]), shown in the following figure, any new technological solution is adopted by customers in this order (from left to right in figure 8):

• innovators: customer who buy technology, not solutions; • early adopters: customers who easily appreciate benefits of new technology. They

do not necessary need a previous success story of the technology in their market; • early majority: customers who want to see well-established references/success

stories; • late majority: customers who are not buying until technology has become an

established standard; • laggards: customers that only buy embedded technology.

Figure 8 - Customer Classification in Technology adoption life-cycle

The most effective marketing strategy is targeting only one group at a time, selling first to the early adopters, then reinforcing the diffusion to each successive level, using the customer group at each level as a marketing base for the next groups, while not wasting resources on trying to reach any given level before it is ready for it [16].

Any technology introduction plan should take into account the technology adoption life-cycle: each time phase of the plan should be devised in accordance. ACT adoption

plan phases

Aim of phase Main type of final users addressed

Main delivery channel Actions of AC-team

1 short term Generating interest in innovative ‘ACT-solution’ approach

Innovators AC-team Dissemination: OS communities, Workshops, Academic courses, Tutorials, etc.

2 short- medium term

Creating ‘awareness’ about ACT-solution by building up ‘success stories’

Early adopters Prosumers/Web operators / Small ICT companies

Delivering ACT-solution to Web and ICT early adopters

3 medium-long term

ACT- solution achieving ‘standard’ level of diffusion

Early majority Medium-large ICT companies and Telco operators

Selling ACT-solution as a ‘paradigm’

4 long term Increasing ACT-solution market share

Late majority/Laggards

Consumer Electronic companies

Selling ACT-solution as a widely adopted standard, embedded in networked sensors /devices

Table 1 - Possible time-phased adoption plan for a generic innovative ‘ACT-solution’


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In the above table is outlined a possible time-phased adoption plan for a generic innovative ‘ACT-solution’ (quite similar to CASCADAS Toolkit, as a matter of fact) aimed to a widespread adoption, finally reaching the most considerable part of the market, that is, the medium/large enterprises, that, mostly, belong to Early-Late majority. This plan, that follows the framework given by the technology adoption cycle and the delivery channel analysis previously addressed, is presented here as a high level overview of a possible evolutionary path to SAC services widespread adoption in the future value grids. The main actor of this plan is a so-called ‘AC-team’, that we might imagine as a consortium made up by Web operators and ICT companies, possibly led by a Telco operator.

In the first phase of this plan (short term), the dissemination is aimed at delivering ACT-solution results to prosumers and small software houses, that, being more flexible than the majority of final users (typically, the medium and large companies), could be ‘innovator type’ customers. Their adoption of ACT-solution could lead to an increasing diffusion of the interest for ACT-solution innovative approach, attracting some Web operators, innovators themselves.

In the second phase (short-medium term), leveraging on the interest created during the previous phase, the ACT-solution framework is being sold to the ‘early adopters’, maybe prosumer communities, small software houses and Web operators. The aim of this phase is increasing the awareness regarding the ACT-solution added value/benefits and starting to build up a recognized ACT-solution “success story” inventory. In this phase, a spiralling path is to be followed: small software house firstly are ‘target’ users and then, going along, might become part of the delivery channel. The action of the ‘2-side MKT intermediary’ company that is partner in AC–team can be the starting point and one of the ‘positive feedback’ factors for initiate and sustain this spiralling path, also in the following phases, avoiding, in this way, the ‘chicken-and-egg’ problem.

In the third phase (medium-long term), using the “success stories” inventory built up in the previous phase and with the support of the ‘2-side MKT intermediary’ action addressed before, the AC team starts selling the ACT-solution to the medium-large enterprises that are the main core of market, possibly ICT and Telco companies. In this phase, the big international Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems developers might be attracted by the acknowledged ACT-solution references and become early majority users, too, and could include at least part of the ACT-solution technologies in their solutions. Further to these events, ACT-solution will start to be recognized as a widely used standard.

Finally, in the fourth phase (long term), ACT-solution, by that time a widely acknowledged ‘standard’, is targeted to the late majority users, marketed by the ACT-solution company, leveraging on the previously achieved “success story” inventory and acknowledged ACT-solution ‘standard’ level of diffusion. The laggard final-users type will buy ACT ‘hidden’ and embedded in their networked devices or sensors.

To summarize, following the above mentioned competitive strategy, the group of companies that has taken the lead in sponsoring the ACT-solution can adapt its possible actions and delivery channels in order to attract, in each phase, the proper customer type accordingly to the technology adoption life-cycle, aiming to cover the most part of the market, including the medium and large enterprises.


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6 Recommendations for fostering autonomic ecosystems

This section reports some recommendations for fostering the development of autonomic ecosystems.

On the one hand, it is necessary to elaborate on the possible impacts/needs of the actors/roles of the future value grids (as addressed in the previous sections) and, on the other hand it is important to consider the potential added value (and, possibly, the relevant strengths and weaknesses) of autonomic technologies (in particular those evidenced in the analysis carried out in D6.8 [11])

There are sound reasons to state that AC technology might have a strong potential impact on the final users (again, both individuals and companies – possibly including the public sector). A widespread adoption of AC technology will likely change the behaviour of not only the proactive technology enthusiasts that will adopt it at first, but also of all people, thanks to the new ACT potentials, especially those related to new social opportunities and the reduction of time for organizing them, besides the time reduced for personal ICT handling. Moreover, as shown in D6.6 [13], business companies will need to develop new operational and management behaviours and skills, in order to handle the new dynamic product/service life cycles and the complex business relationship based on collaboration and partnerships.

Application scenarios developed in this project, such as the Behavioural Pervasive Advertisement (BPA) represent an example of this. BPA has demonstrated that advertising companies may target a precise customer type in a precise time-slot, with a more effective and efficient marketing management: these companies thus will need to refine, or build up, their specific ‘customer oriented’ approach in order to benefit from ACT opportunities.

According to the above reasons, ACT can be categorized as a ‘disruptive’ (or discontinuous) technology, as opposed to a ‘continuous’ technology, that does not significantly change the users behaviour and habits.

According to Moore [16], in the adoption path of a disruptive technology there is a ‘chasm’ between the early adopters, that are a relatively small group of enthusiasts and visionaries, and the early majority users, that belong to the most part of early and late customers, pragmatists in nature (see following figure, adapted from Wikipedia.org). Therefore, we can say that the most difficult part of the ACT evolutionary path addressed in the previous section is moving from step 2 to step 3, that is, between the building up of a wide positive ACT reputation made up of acknowledged and trustworthy ‘success stories’ and the generation of a ‘bandwagon’ effect, by which the pragmatists, both individual and businesses, are forced to feel that if they did not catch the ACT train, they might possibly loose respectively life-style improvement opportunities and competitive edge in the markets.


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Figure 9 – Gap between visionaries and pragmatists in a technology adoption path

Bridging the gap between visionaries and pragmatists should be handled by varying the ACT adoption plan strategy (see following table). We refer, as for the previous section, to the adoption plan of a generic ACT –solution involving a generic AC-team.

ACT marketing target

ACT evolutionary phase

Aim of phase

AC-team strategy Risk Risk management action

Visionaries (innovators and early adopters)

1-2 short medium term

Building up ACT success stories: focus on user requirements gathering and management

ACT-solution is delivered as an Open Source software

OS community does not start

AC-team (consortium of ICT-Telco- web operators) fosters the initial momentum for the OS community, providing both developers and community management resources

Pragmatists (early and late majority)

3-4 medium-long term

Reaching ‘standard’ level of diffusion

ACT-solution is ‘packaged’ in commercial ACT enhanced ‘products’/services

ACT is a prototype, software is in permanent beta state, there might be doubts regarding ACT reliability and trustworthiness

ACT-solution is strongly supported by AC-team, sponsoring the ACT ‘standard’ and providing industrial level quality solution (user support, version control, efficient infrastructure management)

Table 2 - Adoption phases

In the first two phases of the ACT adoption plan depicted in the previous section, the aim is building up an ACT success stories inventory: the AC-team can do this delivering as a Open Source solution (CASCADAS Toolkit has in fact been released under Open Source licence and is already available on Sourceforge.net). Open Source approach has the advantage that free developers provide, together with development work-force, also the needed marketing resources. In fact under Open Source approach the community provides both quality control (bugs inventory and solving) and user requirement gathering and management. This allows the development of a solution that is built up on the basis of user needs, with a community that builds up on itself, attracting enthusiast prosumers, while, at the same time, refining ‘in itinere’ the ACT technology value proposition. This will facilitate the building up of ACT success stories, that will spread up in the community itself and, finally, outside it. One of the main risks can be that the community base does not build up. The momentum for the ACT-solution OS community can be provided by the consortium of Telco-ICT-Web operators, that can supply the initial development work-force and the needed community leadership and management resources. This investment will be paid back later, both by revenues due to new products/services and improved ICT-Telco infrastructure efficiency.


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Concerning in particular follow-ups of CASCADAS solutions, possibly in these phases the AC-team could focus their strategy on prioritising the functionalities related to the Context Awareness and Self-Management features, that have impact, as addressed in deliverable D6.8 [11], on the CASCADAS possible benefits for the creation/composition /maintenance of AC services. The innovators, in fact, are more likely to be interested by a ACT solution focused on a user-centered perspective, from the point of view of ‘power users’ such as the enthusiastic prosumers.

Then, in order to target the majority of the market - the pragmatists – and, so to say, in order to ‘jump clear over the chasm’, to the phases 3-4 in the ACT adoption plan, the AC-team should change its strategy. In order to reach a standard level of diffusion, ACT–solution could be packaged into AC-enhanced commercial products/services or, as evidenced in previous section, into an AC enhanced ‘platform’ provided by the ‘2-side MKT intermediary’ (for commercial uses, now).

Most likely, during the two previous phases, the ACT Open Source solution has always been in a permanent ‘beta’ state, while the ACT solution has been evolving to meet more closely the users needs. Further to that, the risk at this step is that the pragmatists, target of the phases 3-4, may have doubts regarding the ACT software quality ad the overall approach trustworthiness. In order to handle this risk, the AC-team might possibly leverage both on the knowledge acquired and on the leadership established while managing and supporting the OS community in the previous phases, focusing to solution quality and user support aiming at the supply of certified ACT solution with industrial level quality standards.


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7 Conclusions

Considering the evolutionary trends of Telecommunications, ICT and Internet, CASCADAS achievements are impacting the main emerging challenges providing technical background and preliminary proof-of-concepts for introducing autonomic technologies and developing autonomic service ecosystem for future Telecommunications, ICT and Internet.

Network Providers can benefit from the exploitation autonomic technologies for reducing OPEX and CAPEX in delivering and maintaining an infrastructure that is able to provide higher and higher bandwidth connectivity at lower and lower costs. In this sense as person to person communication cannot grow indefinitely, Network Providers have to facilitate the provisioning of connectivity, not only for individuals, but also between applications, any sensors and any network devices (this is line with the Internet of Things vision). Concept of connectivity should go beyond the traditional meaning of physical/networking link, but it should also cover logical linking, ensuring privacy and security in communication networks. In the meanwhile, the vision of autonomic ecosystem should inspire Network Providers in the definition of new roles in the value chains and new business models to make their business sustainable.

Service Providers can benefit from the exploitation of autonomic technologies in the development of open service ecosystems capable of hiding complexities (and reducing costs) in service creation, management and provisioning.

Enterprise (Small Medium and Large) can benefit from the exploitation autonomic service ecosystems as would allow them to gain competiveness in the market by adopting software and service solutions able to self-adapt (in a cost-effective way) to the local needs.

Users can produce and consume highly customized services in a friendly way, taking advantages of a service infrastructure that can exploit the full potential of dynamics of social groups and user communities. Possibly, quality of life will improve, also thanks to the pervasive and seamless support for people by their ‘personal’ ACEs.

In summary, the creation of an autonomic service ecosystems (as an open-source environment) will support a continuous evolution of business models for communications, media-content and software services. In particular, this vision calls also for self-organisation and evolutionary models from Biology to be applied to autonomic software, based on the assumption that such “biological” behaviour of the software, if attained, is likely to optimise Telecommunications, ICT and Internet role in question for socio-economic growth and innovation.

Assessment results (as from D6.8 [11]) reflect a general positive judgment of CASCADAS vision and architectural solutions, highlighting points of strength in comparison with the current service platforms. Nevertheless some indicators (creation/composition, application integration, multi-domain and OPEX/CAPEX savings) got some remarks of weakness; it is recommended that further investigations will be focused to try finding convincing solutions for these areas. Moreover, it is suggested to investigate in more detail the application of autonomic capabilities in the overlay peer-to-peer networks and their impacts in the evolution of the service value chains (these issues were not covered in CASCADAS project, as outside the original scope and objectives).

In general, (as from above D6.10 analysis) it is recommended that ecosystems solutions will be delivered (in the short-medium term) as an Open Source (as beta version). Only in


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the long term (e.g., in 5 years), ‘packaged’ solutions could be offered in commercial enhanced “products” and/or “services”.

d6.10 - recommendations and evolutionary paths to...

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