A Cloud-Based Collaborative Platform Supporting Serviced-Enhanced Products for Emerging Markets

Collaboration through sharing competencies and resources has been a key approach to both creating new competitive environments, as well as achieving the needed agility to rapidly answer to emerging market demands. Establishing proper collaborative networks for service-enhanced products is challenging given the wide diversity of business operations and involved resources. The creation of software solutions to support such collaboration is an effort-intensive task, especially when these solutions are designed to run in the cloud and to be highly customisable to different end-user scenarios. In this paper we describe how a cloud-based platform can support the creation of software solutions for the collaborative development and operation of highly customised and service-enhanced products. The platform has been designed based on numerous key requirements that have been generated from the analysis of different business scenarios from various use cases and domains, as well as general key requirements a cloud-based platform should provide to support collaboration among organisations.