The Internet of Services

Research is currently being conducted into a variety of trends in business and information technology related to the outsourcing of infrastructure and platform services to third parties. Traditional product-related company revenues shift more and more towards service revenues (Cusumano 2008). Terms such as "platform as a service" and "infrastructure as a service" appear, originating in the "software as a service" (SaaS) software distribution paradigm, which is now highly advanced. The transfer of the on-demand idea to other areas of IT and business leads to a set of technical and business-related challenges to the creation of an attractive value proposition for the customer. In the subsequent sections of this chapter we are going to introduce some concepts relating to the "Internet of Services" that play a key role in understanding our research activities and findings in the area of service engineering