Conference March 31^st-April 1^st 2016

Pre-conference March 29^th -30^th 2016 with workshops

Guimarães (Portugal)

     I-ESA brings together the world's leading researchers and practitioners in the area of enterprise interoperability: it is a unique forum for the exchange of visions, ideas, research results and industrial experiences, dealing with a wealth of interoperability research subjects for business, enterprise applications and software.

The I-ESA’16 Conference is being organized by the Escola de Engenharia da Universidade do Minho on behalf of INTEROP Portuguese Pole (PtRP) and INTEROP-VLab (International Virtual Laboratory for Enterprise Interoperability).

The city of Guimarães is historically associated with the foundation and identity of the Portuguese nationality. It is also one of the key poles of Minho industrial region, prosper in national and foreign industry, public and private interface organizations. Exploring the benefits of a long-term approach, the strategic support and cooperation to local SME and large companies are the utmost priorities to Escola de Engenharia of UMinho, as the main source of specialized knowledge to a sustainable and competitive technological and scientific network.

CONFERENCE

One of the trends in the global market is the increasing collaboration among enterprises. Constant changes in inter- and intra-organisational environment will persist in the future. Organisations have to react flexibly and continuously to (imminent) changes in markets and trading partners.

Large companies but also SMEs have to cope with internal changes from both a technical (e.g. new information, communication, software and hardware technologies) and an organisational point of view (e.g. merging, re-organisation, virtual organisations, etc).

Industry’s need for Enterprise Interoperability has been one of the significant drivers for research into the Internet of the Future. EI research will embrace and extend contributions from the Internet of Things and the Internet of Services, and will go on to drive the future needs for the Internets of People, Processes, and Knowledge. 

Nowadays, companies maximise flexibility and speed of response to changing market conditions, by focusing on core innovation and information centred activities, outsourcing capital and labour intensive activities to less advanced economies. They develop knowledge and links with other companies with which they can collaborate to provide the products and services that the market demands – the networked enterprise, or virtual organisation. Successful enterprises in this knowledge economy may be small, but are highly productive, focussed on innovation and capable of flexibly and rapidly sharing information and knowledge to participate in highly competitive networked enterprises. The issue of interoperability within the enterprise is therefore no longer limited to the interoperability between silos of systems within single companies, but has become one of interoperability throughout a value chain.

The industry will find at I-ESA’16 an outstanding opportunity to exchange experience and problems on business interoperability in their daily operations.

During the main conference, there will be an attractive exhibits programme and an additional brokerage event, including a hands-on "industrial use case challenge". Additionally, I-ESA’16 will feature a high-quality pre-conference programme consisting of workshops, tutorials, and a doctoral symposium.

I-ESA´16 is certainly "the event" for those who want to know the future, the forefront of research and the industry expertise/viewpoint in this very important domain of Enterprise Interoperability.