Source: Plenary Panel “Future Trends – Computing as a core discipline”, 31st Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2007)

Services Computing: Foundational Discipline of the Modern Services Science
Dr. Liang-Jie (LJ) Zhang 
SOA Services Research Lead and Founding Chair of Services Computing PIC
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA, This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Services now account for more than 70% of the U.S. economy. Services Computing has become a foundational discipline that covers the science and technology of services innovation research that leverages IT and computing technology to model, create, and manage business solutions, scientific applications, as well as modernized services. The underneath technology suite includes Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), business consulting methodology and utilities, business process modeling, transformation and integration, and Web services.

Figure 1 illustrates the scope of Services Computing covers the whole lifecycle of services innovation research from computing and software perspectives that include business componentization, services modeling, services creation, services realization, services annotation, services deployment, services discovery, services composition, services delivery, service-to-service collaboration, services monitoring, services optimization, as well as services management.
 

Figure 1. Services Computing Landscape

The goal of Services Computing is to enable IT services and computing technology to perform business services more efficiently and effectively. The issues addressed in this domain of research are quite different from those addressed by researchers in related information technologies such as Internet & networking, software development, databases and multimedia. Services Computing on the one side interfaces with applications like multimedia systems and e-commerce and on the other side interfaces with technologies like Internet, Web, & networking, database, software engineering, and parallel and distributed system but have little overlap with these existing fields.
The Services Computing discipline is creating what will become one of the most significant industries of the new century. We recognize the potential value that services computing can bring to our research and engineering community. It is our mission to build an open and collaborative community providing leading technologies, development ideas, and trends to an international membership for researchers, engineers, and business leaders in the field of Services Computing.

IEEE Computer Society officially launched "Services Computing" technical committee and technical community in 2003 [1] after “Web Services Computing” was launched in 2001 as a special track. In 2004, IBM Research officially adopted Services Computing [2] as a research discipline (in Computer Science and Engineering, and Mathematical Science) and created the Services Computing Professional Interest Community (PIC), which is the first dedicated research community to support Services Innovation Research at IBM. IBM’s Services Computing research and academic civilities include Services Technologies, Services Solutions, Services in Organizations, and Services Sciences, Management and Engineering (SSME) [3]. In 2006, SSME was one of the academic activities [4] under IBM’s Services Computing discipline. From scope perspective, SSME is more focused on Services in Organizations that deal with people and organization aspects in a services business.

Services University (servicesscience.org) has been launched to cover the whole spectrum of science and technology on how to create and leverage computing and software technology to build, operate, and manage services business in an effective and efficient way. In summary, Services Computing has become the foundational discipline that focuses on fundamental theories, algorithms, technologies, and methodologies used for modernizing services industry.

References:
[1] Technical Committee on Services Computing, IEEE Computer Society, http://tab.computer.org/tcsc
[2] Services Computing at IBM Research, http://www.research.ibm.com/services
[3] Innovation Matters,  IBM Research, http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research.nsf/pages/r.ai.brochure2006.html