INDUSTRY

One of the largest ever EU initiatives promoting open-source software for SMEs, the Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) could revolutionise how small and medium-sized companies buy and develop software. DBE helps businesses to develop applications, and software developers to sell to a global market. Most small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) currently find it difficult and expensive to develop customised software. Custom development is costly and time-consuming, while using standard packages locks firms into one supplier. SMEs form the backbone of Europe's economy, but the sector has been unable, to date, to reap the full benefits of recent ICT advances. The partners involved in the DBE project intend to change that and, so far, appear to be succeeding. DBE is an internet-based software environment that facilitates the development of business software applications. What is truly revolutionary about the DBE environment is that the software is described both as a programming function and as a business process. The upshot is that business people can define a need and acquire software tailored to their business. Unlike semantic-web services, users need no programming knowledge – it is software development made simple. Unlocking ICT for SMEs DBE is an open-source project that uses standard, platform-independent technologies such as Java. "It means SMEs don't get locked into one supplier," says project coordinator Andrea Nicolai of T-6 in Rome. Another benefit is that it enables small software companies, or even individual programmers, to market their work on a global stage. The system works by combining small, reusable software functions in a way that enables businesses to design and acquire complex enterprise-strength systems. Potential application areas include enterprise software functions such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) or even project management. "This is a new way of using ICT," says Nicolai. "It's completely distributed – nobody controls it. One SME makes the software, another uses it, and they can use natural language to express both functional and business needs." It is also designed to evolve over time to new and emerging requirements from a variety of markets. In the UK for example, the project team developed software that enabled local restaurants to post daily specials to an online map, so that visitors can find local restaurants and see what they are serving. Restaurants could never afford that sort of functionality on their own. Now that service could easily be adapted to other locations anywhere in the world. And that's just a simple example of DBE's potential. "This is the largest EU open-source software initiative ever launched for SME applications, with over ten million euros of funding, twenty partners and over one hundred researchers across ten member states," notes Nicolai. Being piloted worldwide DBE is currently being piloted in three European regions; Finland, Spain and the UK. In each country a regional partner gets local SMEs involved in the project, and each region then focuses on tailoring the application to specific local needs. In the UK this is multimedia, in Finland enterprise software, and tourism applications in Spain. While the DBE project ends in January 2007, DBE itself will continue afterwards. In addition to the three startup regions, it has attracted interest from other businesses, regions and governments across Europe, including Lazio, Trento and Piemonte in Italy, Extramadura in Spain, Baden Wuerttemberg and Stuttgart in Germany. The DBE environment has already been linked to structural-funds based development in the Aragon region of Spain. And in India, digital ecosystem technologies are being used in the development of agri-business applications. The DBE team hopes therefore to set up further organisations to act as regional catalysts in a number of countries both within and without the EU. In Brazil, the Ministry of Culture is planning to use the system to link more than 600 multimedia cultural centres. Each centre has its own media lab, and produces music, television and interviews using a broad mix of media. Multimedia content using Creative Commons licensing "By linking these centres across the DBE environment, the ministry will create Peer-2-Peer (P2P) TV, so anyone in the network can mix and match whatever 'media objects' are available on the network. And because these objects are available under the Creative Commons copyright, they can be used for free, as is the case for all the results from our project," says Nicolai. DBE project researchers hope to establish a DBE Open Source organisation that will continue to maintain and update the system, and intend to recruit sponsors, investors and partners to help make that happen. "We'd really like to work with people who want to support the open-source software movement, people like Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu, a very popular version of Linux. Such investors can appreciate the strengths of DBE and help support the aims of open-source software."