This SIB Community aims to promote the development and adoption of advanced solutions in the ICT domain with the twofold goal of fostering innovation in the ICT domain as well as ensuring that future ICT is able to sustain innovation in all application domains: future Internet technologies and services, communications infrastructure and computing. These three areas determine the overall focus of this SIB.

First, this SIB brings together all stakeholders and actors involved in the development and implementation of Future Internet technologies. In such respect, this SIB will play a catalyst role for all other SIBs, ensuring that future Internet technologies will respond to the arising needs of the global society and economy. The ensembles of such technologies and their applications to various industrial sectors are usually gathered under the ‘Future Internet’ umbrella term. The Future Internet will include faster and greener communication and networking technologies, which will be used to build a pervasive digital infrastructure. The border of such an infrastructure will blur into physical objects, which will be seamlessly integrated into this global, all-encompassing system (‘Internet-of-Things’). The Future Internet will integrate computing and storage in a native form, becoming a ubiquitous platform through which users can access advanced services that are physically running and executed remotely, ‘in the Cloud’. The Future Internet will support real-time services as required by some industrial sectors, and will support the system of social relationships of its users.

Second, with communications networks, software and applications at the core of so many products and services today it is imperative that all players involved learn to “speak the same language” to promote effective collaboration. This SIB therefore aims to promote cross-fertilisation of perspectives across the Innovation Cycle – and specifically to provide ICT research with a clearer understanding of funding, IPR, business development, societal impact and the other factors required to successfully commercialise emerging technologies. Likewise, the SIB promotes a deeper understanding of research challenges and prospects by other non-research actors in this area. This multidisciplinary approach aims to make research more market-driven thereby increase prospects for successful commercialisation.

Third, this SIB brings together scientists, practitioners and industry representatives actively working in the computing field, promoting mutual understanding, fostering cross-fertilization and laying the foundations for innovation in the ‘Internet of Services’ arena. This will build on a number of activities spanning both theoretical aspects (service-oriented architectures, scalable algorithms, distributed middleware and peer-to-peer architectures, advances in data mining and business intelligence), technological ones (infrastructures for ubiquitous service provisioning, including clouds and mobile clouds), standardization-related issues (definition of shared interfaces for enabling interoperability) and business ones (how will software and service provision business evolve in the next decades).