Openness central to IBM’s vision of one-stop cloud marketplace

Like Microsoft and Google, IBM would love to be the go-to company for cloud computing services. To compete, Big Blue is embracing openness as a key differentiator in its cloud vision — hence its collaboration with academic, business and political groups in the European Union on the newly formed Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI) consortium, which aims to build a central buffet table from which organization could choose from and blend to taste a smorgasbord of disparate cloud services — such as data storage, task execution, and service integration — delivered by an array of providers. 

Openness is key to ASCI’s envisioned cloud-computing framework, through which organizations could easily grab and blend separately managed cloud-based services to meet their respective business needs, all on a pay-per-use basis, according to the new consortium. That openness could prove a key differentiator to, say, Microsoft’s emerging cloud-computing vision.

[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Get ready for the IBM cloud | Get the no-nonsense explanations and advice you need to take real advantage of cloud computing in the InfoWorld editors’ 21-page Cloud Computing Deep Dive PDF special report, featuring an exclusive excerpt from David Linthicum’s new book on cloud architecture. ]

The ACSI framework will be composed of interoperation hubs — virtual rendezvous for multiple services — which work well in the context of open-service networks, according to ACSI. “These hubs are primarily reactive, serving as a kind of structured white board that participating services can refer to, that can be updated with information relevant to the group, that can assist the services by carrying out selected tasks, and that can notify services of key events,” according to the consortium’s website.

The interoperation hubs will be structured around dynamic artifacts, which “provide a holistic marriage of data and process, both treated as first-class citizens, as the basic building block for modeling, specifying, and implementing services and business processes. … Artifacts can give an end-to-end view of how key conceptual business entities evolve as they move through the business operations, in many cases across two or more silos.”

This framework would be a welcome alternative to the current complex process of integrating outside Web services with internal processes, according to Dr. Fabiana Fournier, consortium leader and scientist at IBM Research. “Up until now, organizations have had to invest significant time and money in conventional, mostly manual blending and customizing efforts to enable their e-business service operations to communicate and work collaboratively,” he said.

Through this kind of framework, businesses would be able to access services such as data storage, task execution, and service integration on a pay-per-use model, adding or reducing resources as needed.

ACSI has high hopes for just how much efficiency organizations will be able to wring out of such a framework versus the current integration of cloud services: at least a 40 percent reduction in the design and deployment of environments that support large numbers of service collaborations with similar goals; at least a 20 percent reduction in the costs of on-boarding into, and maintaining, service collaborations; at least a 30 percent reduction in ongoing manual activity needed to support typical service collaborations; and the automation of at least 90 percent of data transformation in service collaborations.

This article, “Openness central to IBM’s vision of one-stop cloud marketplace,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog.