IBM on Wednesday announced it was establishing a consortium with the European Union and universities to research new cloud-computing models to reduce the cost of hosting and maintaining Internet-based services.
The researchers will undertake a project called Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI), which is based on a concept of interoperation hubs, which was introduced by IBM Research last year. These hubs provide cloud-based environments in which flexible Internet-based software and services can easily be created and deployed. Customers would pay for service integration and pay for the hosted services depending on data stored and transactions completed. Consortium partners will develop services and applications for the project, IBM said.
