Composite Business Ecosystems for the Web of Everything: Using Cloud Platforms for Web Convergence

The Web is constantly expanding its reach into new areas, growing out from its relatively simple beginnings as a platform for information sharing and linking. Over the last few years the rise of cloud, mobile and social technologies have driven the influence of the Web into traditional value chains, digitizing many transactional and social interactions and opening up opportunities for new business models. At the same time new initiatives such as 6LoWPAN and CoAP are pushing the edges of the Web even further out, opening up opportunities to digitize and socialize the millions of sensors and other physical devices operating at the edge of the network. In this paper we discuss the way in which we are building out a converged, Web-scale cloud platform for the aggregation, orchestration and monetization of new forms of converged value webs. Such value webs - or Composite Business Ecosystems - will be able to transparently leverage a diverse range of node types across this new Web of Everything.