IBM has launched a research consortium in collaboration with the European Union, industry and academia, which it aims to enable businesses to take advantage of Internet-based services - or 'e-services' - to create collaborative business operations and achieve shared business goals.

The company said that its research focuses on the development of a new computer science model that will enable organisations to accelerate the typically time-intensive process around the coordination of e-services and increase the automation and efficiency around deploying new e-services.

According to IBM, the research will enable even small to mid-sized businesses to create or join into flexible e-services, without investing in expensive IT expertise. The initiative will create open-source software to enable many organisations around the world take advantage of the technology.

Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI), simplifies and streamlines the process of blending multiple, separately managed e-services into a dynamic, organic whole. The consortium plans to demonstrate that the new framework can reduce the cost of creating industry-specific service blends by 40% over conventional techniques.

In addition, the ACSI framework is anticipated to enable automation of about 90% of the data transformations needed to support them; and translates into a dramatic savings over conventional approaches to designing, deploying, maintaining, and joining into environments that support e-services.

Dr Fabiana Fournier, consortium leader and scientist at IBM Research, said: "Up until now, organisations have had to invest significant time and money in conventional, mostly manual blending and customising efforts to enable their e-business service operations to communicate and work collaboratively.

"ACSI represents a new combination of computer science principles that are designed to enable businesses to retain a laser focus on operations and goals as they achieve new efficiencies in blending and interleaving e-services."