What is S&S?

If we speak about services it's time to lean back. "Service" is a term that is used avidly both in academia and industry. However, there exists no community consensus on the meaning of the word, and different people and actors have their own interpretations.

Think about big IT companies like IBM or HP. They define "service" as a "repeatable (business) task" like checking a customer credit or opening a new account and so on. Driven by the marketing phenomena of Web 2.0 people related with Internet business use "service" more in the sense of "software as service". In this approach, the Web is used to provide many customers with access to functions that have been specifically designed for this mode of use. CRM solutions like the commercial software Salesforce or the Open Source pendant SugarCRM are examples for that interpretation as well as Google Word or the modularized Microsoft phantom of the IT grapevine called "Vienna" that should eventually succeed Windows Vista.

You remember the elephant mentioned on the homepage? The poor animal runs the risk of getting lost in the buzzword jungle. So we say stop and try to get a bird’s eye view again. We have decided to avoid using the word "services" and instead say that we are interested in "software as modular and distributed systems". So we are open to trends in Grid computing as well as SOA but not limited to definitions that were made in the majority of cases by marketing departments for marketing purpose.