British Telecom, Nokia, SAP and Siemens are among a dozen or so high-tech companies lining up to support efforts to strengthen Europe's position in the global software and information technology industries. To that end, the companies launched a consortium on Wednesday called the Networked European Software and Services Initiative, or NESSI.

via C|NET

From NESSI's Exec Summary:
José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, has re-emphasised the importance of the objective for Europe to become by 2010 “the world’s most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy�. The objectives set in Lisbon in March 2000 – higher growth, more and better jobs and greater social inclusion – are ambitious, and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) were identified as playing a key role in driving the transformation of the European economy.

Within the ICT area, the sector of software and IT services takes a significant share of the European economy. In 2004 it directly employed more than 1 million European professionals. Taking into consideration the added value of IT for economic sectors that utilise it, from banking and eGovernment to automotive, logistics and health, the actual share of software and IT services ranges between 5 and 6% of the European GDP. Moreover, the sector of software and IT services is a growth engine in that it stimulates the creation of high added-value, sustainable jobs. Over the last five years, 60% of the jobs created in Europe were highly skilled, and the increase of ‘high-knowledge’ employment was three times faster than the average growth in more traditional sectors.

Today however the IT services marketplace is changing dramatically, due to a series of factors:

* Businesses and the Public Sector, which require flexibility to keep up with the ever increasing pace of change caused by globalisation and technological innovation.
* A continuing shift toward increasingly made-to-order solutions, which changes the balance of demand from products to services and from monolithic do-it-all applications to ad hoc service components and customised software solutions.
* The clear emergence of Open Source Software, which nourishes the dynamics of the ICT marketplace and creates an “eco-system� that fosters opportunities by: increasing options and competition, aligning to open standards objectives, positioning software as a public good, improving technological self-reliance, increasing transparency, minimising security risk while optimising costs.
* The broader uptake by end-users, which is gaining momentum, leads to new needs such as ubiquitous access, ease of use, personalisation and trusted transactional capabilities on all types of platforms, from embedded systems to distributed environments.

With this in mind, it is obvious that the IT sector is at the very heart of the Lisbon agenda, as it aims at delivering the benefits of the information society to people and organisations through services based upon innovative software infrastructures.

Promoted by thirteen major European ICT corporations, totalling almost a million jobs and about 300 B€ revenues, the NESSI Technology Platform aims to provide a unified view for European research in Services Architectures and Software Infrastructures that will define technologies, strategies and deployment policies fostering new, open, industrial solutions and societal applications that enhance the safety, security and well-being of citizens.