The session kicked off with a motivating talk by Mick Haynes from Hitrail about the evolution of networks and service infrastructures within the railway industry. With the recent push by EU legislation for greater interoperability, cooperation and competition between railway operators, Hitrail are looking to Future Internet technologies such as Cloud and IPv6 to deliver reduced costs and greater efficiency. Hitrail support three main clients' including traditional large railways, low cost smaller railways and operators providing connections to other transport systems. Data is at the heart of thier network with requirements for real-time exchange, synchronization and global indexing of database across administrative domains.  Mick said the major challenge is to open their infrastructure to new types of services whilst still delivering connectivity, security, QoS guarantees and service reliability in critical applications such as reservation, availability, interchange, and freight consignment notes. 

Makis Stamatelatos, University of Athens led the infrastructure perspective arguing that virtualized resources are the foundation of the Future Internet but with so much complexity the identifying the distribution of responsibilities is tough. Cutting costs was the major focus of discussion within this perspective with management costs currently running at 30%. Sergi Figuerola from i2CAT said that GEYSERS goal is CAPEX reduction through the use and interconnection between virtualized infrastructures. GEYSER's identifies three roles physical provider, virtual infrastructure provider, virtual infrastructure operator. Sergi argued that a common information model is needed along with greater flexibility in actor roles. Such an approach would allow stakeholders to play multiple roles and allows for recursive combinations of infrastructures to be created and controlled. Value chain scenario analysis and role assignment is an essential part of the UNIVESELF project which aims to develop a unifying network management system.  Although, virtualization and autonomics have potential to reduce costs Martin Waldburger, University of Zurich, highlighted how accounting for high speed networks is a significant cost driver. With only nSecs per package processing time for a 10G link the risk of loss of information is increasing, at a time when the legislative requirements are becoming ever more stringent. 

Man-Sze Li, IC Focus Ltd introduced the Services and Business perspective outlining the vision of the FInES cluster for Interoperable Service Utilities and Open Business Ecosystems. VLASTUIN, a European SME, said that Europe needed to create a value network environment for open innovation. Neutrality of services needs to be preserved and a new approach to intellectual property rights must be adopted that replaces the current Patent wars. Sergi Gusmeroli, Txt solutions, challenged the FI-PP asking whether the generic enablers were enough to bootstrap a universal business ecosystem? When a service is commoditized it becomes the enabler for innovation and the micro enterprise can join. Sergi called for the PPP to commoditize service capabilities through open processes for the Enterprise and to avoid just trying to protect value in service assets.

The final discussion was chaired by Professor Marcus Seifert, University of Bremen

Markus argued that we need to put these values into our interpretation of the Future Internet. The discussion contrasted the value of the Internet of Things and people. Should we consider things or the experience of things? How to protect the things we value? The US has a habit of amplifying their values on the Internet whilst in Europe we experience the continuous tension between Internet freedom and championing of European values. The way in which value is represented on the Internet is changing. With 600K iPhone apps and 500K Andriod apps micro values exist. For example, how would have thought that a customer would pay to drink a virtual glass of beer? Clearly, there's a shift in the balance between economic quantitative and qualitative values though online community interaction. Finally, the session highlighted the conflict/contrast between industries desire for greater openness in closed and structured networks and individuals and business desire for greater control/closure of open unstructured networks. This is the balance that is currently being played out within the Future Internet ecosystem.

Google's business model targets users but Google is also a "user" of infrastructure in similar ways to how the Enterprise is a consumer of the network. User's only pay when we use a resource and therefore the Future Internet needs the dynamics in the network itself. Economics would tell us that the value is the utility of thing, although we do not expect utility services to be commercially viable within the timeframe of 2020, not through conventional market incentives. There are lots of other models emerging (e.g. PPP) and alternatives to PPP to enable different parties to work together. Key challenge is that the economic models do not have enough conceptual tools to understand the nature of intangibles.

Where do we have to learn and develop to make benefit from the technologies as society, companies and policy makers?