A community based interoperability utility for SMEs

In Europe, more than 19 million companies are Small and Medium size Enterprises (SMEs), representing 99.8% of all registered businesses, making the European economy depend upon their contribution to wealth creation and employment. Although SMEs have some strong advantages in flexibility and responsiveness, they struggle to compete for large projects where efficient and effective collaborations are required. Enterprise interoperability has been addressed by research for decades without real success as well as having little impact on SMEs. Consequently the market still lacks an affordable, easy to integrate solution. Instead, SMEs face costly investment, extensive integration effort and significant revision of their working tools and systems. One of the main challenges addressed by our research is to support SMEs with an (almost) zero cost of entry into interoperability, based on non-proprietary protocols, allowing these enterprises to reuse existing and familiar applications such as e-mail. This paper introduces such an interoperability solution for SMEs.