E2ESU — stable foundations for digital business ecosystems

Change is widely seen as one of the defining characteristics of digital ecosystems. We argue that stability and, in particular, stable foundations are equally important and are, in fact, a precondition for openness to change. At present, more and more ICT products become commodities in fact, the commoditization can be seen as one key drivers behind the radical and rapid changes in the Web-2.0 world. Future economic growth in the Internet requires collaborative and intelligent services and the opportunity for service providers to compose and integrate widely distributed services into adaptable end-to-end business processes. We describe the end-to-end service utility (E2ESU) initiative that aims to create a thin, well specified, linking infrastructure layer atop the current Internet infrastructure that serves as a sound and firm foundation for the value-added services developed by service providers. The utilities are so to say the ground layer in an ecosystem inhabited by utilities, value-added services, and service-based applications. However, our notion of utilities challenges the often published assertion that all agents in an ecosystem may mutate without any external restrictions. We contend instead that the basic building blocks of a reliable and dependable infrastructure backbone must vary, but within the limits of clear-cut and well-defined specifications.