What is the DBE?

The Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) is a part of the next generation of information and communication technology. It will enable users, mostly business users, to achieve things that simply are not possible today due to the limits of current technology.
In essence, DBE is a special Internet-based environment in which businesses will be able to interact with each other in very effective and efficient ways. The ecosystem will contain services that are supported by application software specially written to take advantage of the ecosystem. Because of the functionality of the ecosystem these services will evolve over time, constantly seeking to improve their effectiveness for the user.

The shape of this next generation is still emerging, but some aspects of what it will involve are already clear:

• The use of the Internet as an environment, via which services can be delivered and commercial transactions made
• The use of open source principles so that, like the Internet itself, no organisation can ever dominate the ecosystem, and all contributors will have an equal chance to compete
• Finally - and this is the most exciting and innovative step – the use of software applications and services that are able to ‘evolve’ and to organise themselves in a way that is optimised for the end user

As a European initiative, the DBE will put European ICT companies and their SME clients at the forefront of this next generation of evolving software, and so help European SMEs to compete at world-class level no matter how small, remote, or obscure their business.

The DBE Project - Creating the Digital Business Ecosystem

The DBE vision of the future is becoming reality through a €14 million 3-year research project supported by European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme IST Thematic Priority. It involves 20 partners from 10 EU Member States who are working together as an ‘Integrated Project’ to solve the technical issues and to build the user community that will launch the DBE as a permanent facility.

The DBE Project is currently developing the ‘evolutionary’ technology that is the key to the DBE. It involves harnessing well-known principles of self-organisation and self-optimisation, taken from various fields of science and nature, and applying them to the interactions between businesses. These interactions form value chains that can be thought of as the ‘organisms’ that inhabit the ecosystem and that will change and evolve over time.

The project integrates expertise from the worlds of science, computing, business, and economic development. Work is simultaneously underway on developing the fundamental principles of applying science to software evolution, modelling business processes so that such models can become the building blocks of software services, and understanding the needs and competitive environment of SMEs in order to provide services that add value and increase profitability. The project structure in effect creates a pathway that connects top researchers to SMEs in EU regions in order to achieve the objective of turning scientific principles into useful tools for everyday business. Regional involvement in the project ensures that the end objective is to benefit SMEs.

DBE Project schematic

The regional dimension

The DBE Project is linked to a growing number of EU regions, three of which were direct partners in the Project, and others that have become associated to the project, using regional funding, in order to bring the benefits of being at the leading edge of ICT development to their region.

The role of these ‘Regional Catalysts’ is to connect their region to the DBE. This includes its strategic and policy actors, SME intermediary or support organisations, and the SMEs themselves.
The Regional Catalyst has a multi-purpose role:

• Making the region aware of the project
• Coordinating the involvement of key actors from the region
• Identifying strategically important sectors in the region where the DBE could have a high value
• Identifying target SMEs as early users
• Researching the needs of the users: software developers, software service providers, and end users, and expressing these needs to the researchers
• Helping to establish user communities in their region and to link these across Europe and beyond

In many ways the Regional Catalyst is at the heart of the DBE Project, providing the main link between the project and the SMEs it serves.

International dimension

While the DBE is a European initiative, it is by not closed to international cooperation, and indeed is actively seeking Regional Catalysts from other parts of the world. The spirit of DBE is that of open source and open collaboration.

SMEs in the DBE

The DBE Project, and the resulting creation of the DBE, will create an opportunity for SMEs to operate and compete at world-class level. During the Project there will be opportunities for SMEs to participate in several ways:

• Application software developers
• Application service providers (ASPs)
• End users from the targeted business areas

SMEs will be involved via their Regional Catalysts. Formal calls for participation are envisaged, with project funding allocated to part support the costs of SME participation in the development and testing of the DBE.

Implementing the DBE

The end result of the DBE Project will be the emergence of the DBE as an open and distributed ITC platform. This will be aimed initially at business-to-business transactions, but could later be easily extended to many other fields where self-organising and self-optimising systems could be used. A self-sustaining community of users comprising application developers, service providers and end users – those SMEs doing business via the DBE, will manage it.

It will be important that there is a strong community driving DBE, similar to, and indeed part of, the thriving open source community. DBE is also following a number of standards, chief of which is the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) put forward by the Object Management Group (OMG), which represents a radical new approach to application development.
Success for the project will mean providing Europe with a recognised advantage in the next generation of software application development and use.