From Internet to Cross-Organisational Networking
Lutz Schuberta, Alexander Kippa, Stefan Wesnera
aHLRS – University of Stuttgart, Nobelstr. 19, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
Abstract. The Internet has become a powerful means of communication and interaction and
various research projects have shown its potential to revolutionize business models and
means of cooperation. Only recently, development has made significant progress in catching
up with research and a series of products have been exposed to the market which may well
represent the next step to realize this revolution.
This development will allow flexible resource and capability sharing across the net, as if the
according capabilities would be locally available – even though this is already possible in
principle, new models will allow maintenance of resources & capabilities on an operating
system level, making it completely transparent to the average user.
This paper will show how the market is currently changing to host a new range of operating
systems and collaboration support that will give rise to complete new capabilities, business
models and communities, but at the same time will have us rethink classical approaches to
problem solving. The paper will therefore examine recent research approaches to so-called
Virtual Organisations and how they contribute to realizing new collaboration modes. It will
show how major IT vendors are approaching this vision and where the current development
may lead to, and how this will influence future business models.
Keywords. future internet, platform as a service, collaborative networks, service oriented
architectures, virtualisation
Introduction
The Internet is no longer just a means of sharing data and information: with the
increase in bandwidth and hosts, it has become a new form of resource itself. With
the advent of the Grid, respectively more recently of Web Services, it has become
possible to use and share application logic, code and local resources
programmatically over the web. This shifts the need for resource availability away
from the actual organization wanting to perform specific tasks to any host available
on the web, i.e. a form of outsourcing over the Internet. Say for example that
company Y needs to acquire more computational power in order to complete a
specific calculation in time – since the advent of computational Grid (see e.g.
EGEE [8]) it is possible for scientists to use distribute computational resources in
order to get their results in time, without having to spend money on buying
additional computing systems which they may not need as part of their common,

2 L. Schubert, A. Kipp and S. Wesner
day-to-day business. We will explain in section 1 of this paper how Web Services
and the concept of Virtual Organisations have realized new business models.
However, the concept of exposing resources and capabilities over web services
/ the net is taking up only very slowly – up to day, only a few thousand web
services [15] exists that are openly available on the internet and only a few of them
are actually of commercial interest, whilst most are provided by academic research
or communities, similar to open source tools. Even Amazon and Google, ranking
to the most popular commercial organizations providing web service, still offer
their services cautiously and with a higher interest in research than in commercial
exploitation.
As with any new development in the market, the problem behind this lack of
commercial support is a mixture of both supply and demand: providers will not
want to go through the effort of exposing capabilities via the web with no obvious
demand for it and with ongoing problems in resource usage accounting, whilst
potential customers do not yet see the benefit of troubling themselves with writing
applications for such remote resources when there are still so few commercially
interesting capabilities available which are furthermore difficult to retrieve. Whilst
an experimental, research driven transition is certainly a valid approach to increase
the interest in the consumers, the main problems are thereby not addressed: remote
resource usage is still complicated, interoperability issues hinder simple
integration, required capabilities / providers are difficult to find and security
breaches, respectively resource misusage are difficult to prevent.
Efforts undergone e.g. by IBM and SUN, as well as by standardization bodies
to reduce this problem by introducing standard means for interoperability,
protocols for resource account, security strategies have not yet impacted upon the
community as was originally hoped for. Framework support that intends to cover
the full problem scope, as realized e.g. by Globus, Unicore or gLite, is still
cumbersome to use and has hence not found the uptake necessary.
Only recently, a complete new set of base capabilities has been published, that
opens up a complete new range of possibilities for future internet based
interactions and cooperation. In section 2 of this paper we will examine these
technologies, such as Google Apps, Force and in particular the programming
foundation .NET3.5 by Microsoft, which, with its WCF, provides a means of
realizing future platforms tightly integrated with and across the Internet.
Section 3 will show how such future platforms could be devised, what they will
look like and how this will revolutionize the classical ways of enacting Virtual
Organisations across the Internet, respectively to realize collaborative setups in a
complete new, dynamic and community-like fashion.
Finally, in section 4 we will show how such new business models may find
explicit usage in the domain of concurrent engineering, being one of the most
resource demanding, and complexity driven domains that may hence even be
considered a testing milestone for complex infrastructures. This will also show up
restrictions of the models, as well as outstanding work to be performed in this area.