Interoperability of enterprises is the emerging need in Europe for joint projects and business facing new marketing challenges. In multi-partners projects and business, aimed at developing innovative joint products, Large Enterprises (LEs) suffer from a lack of synergy and cohesion with the Small-Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMEs), due to the missing sharing of project information, knowledge, workflows, etc.
VENIS project (www.venis-project.eu) is a research & development FP7 FoF project that addresses these issues with its focus on enabling interoperability and collaboration among SMEs and LEs.
VENIS implements a lightweight platform, the VENIS Services for Enterprises Interoperability (VSI), specifically focused towards the interoperability and collaboration between Large Enterprises, with rich IT ecosystems, and the Small Medium Enterprises with poor or missing IT infrastructure.
The VENIS system is composed by three different layers, the Virtual Common Repository (VCR), the Distributed Data Sharing (DDS) and the Business Processes Handler (BPH).
The Repository Services constitute the software layer able to abstract the information of the LEs and SMEs local repositories. The Virtual Common Repository does not contain the information directly, but it mediates the access to shared artifacts, while these are remaining located in the existing LEs or SMEs IT infrastructure. Using the Repository Services, a set of ad-hoc adapters can be developed and tested to expose, in a common digital format, the LEs and SMEs information through a SOAP interface.
The Distributed Data Sharing layer, which maintains the common repository, is equipped with a set of lightweight web services for the smart integration of the information exchanged in joint works, based on legacy email systems and boosted by semantic annotations and search.
Finally, on the upper level, a distributed processes engine mechanism is provided to support the joint work of the partners in a project-based collaboration. The Business Processes Handler is able to model, link and execute the enterprises business processes, to assist the work in joint businesses and to create novel synergies in products supply chains.
Learn more about VENIS approach to interoperability and the tools that have been developed to support collaboration among LE and SMEs:
