Value of the COIN

The COIN project support the establishment of business models for interoperability service utilities that will match current market condition and competition.  This way, the Information Technology vision of Software as a Service (SaaS) finds its implementation in the field of interoperability among collaborative enterprises, supporting the various collaborative business forms, from supply chains to business ecosystems, and becoming for them like a utility, a commodity, the so-called Interoperability Service Utility (ISU).

The COIN project will develop an original business model based on the SaaS-U (Software as a Service-Utility) paradigm where the open-source COIN service platform will be able to integrate both free-of-charge and chargeable, open and proprietary services depending on the case and business policies.

SaaS-U is an instantiation of the ISU [http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/enet/ei-research-roadmap_en.html EI RR V4], from the perspective of business models, in the COIN Project:

• It postulates an evolutionary path from SaaS to Utility
• It interprets the ISU in the context of Future Internet business scenarios

• It focuses on EI and EC services, in particular on information-knowledge-process interoperability for the former and on product development, production planning and project management collaborative services for the latter.

SaaS-U is a business model.

Key concepts:

• Utilities as a basis for Software Service infrastructures: adapting the metaphors and properties of existing utilities such as gas, water, electricity and telephony to electronic service-based environments
• Services, Value Added Services and Service-based applications: the concept of Services as the major building blocks of distributed applications and the notion that services may build on other services to create ad hoc and complex combinations of functionality
• End-to-End properties: frameworks for the description, measurement and management of system properties in a networked environment
• Design principles: inheriting the basic principles of the Internet to ensure not just interworking, but also (1) universality of services, (2) accessibility of services, (3) neutrality of services 
• Future Internet infrastructures: the evolution of the current Internet infrastructure to a ubiquitous, always on, always accessible rich interconnection layer between not only dedicated endpoint devices (as is today), but almost any device and system present in the world