Interoperability in the context of enterprise applications is the ability of a system or a product to work with other systems or products without special effort from the customer or user. The capability to interact and exchange information both internally and with external organisations (partners, suppliers, customers) is a key issue in the economic sector. It is fundamental in order to produce goods and services quickly and at lower cost, while ensuring higher levels of quality and customisation.

Today, 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.

I-ESA brings together the world’s leading researchers and practitioners in the area of enterprise interoperability, and 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 industry will find at I-ESA’08 an outstanding opportunity to exchange experience and problems on business interoperability in their daily operations. I-ESA series of conferences have become a forum where industry and research worlds meet and share experience, ideas and problems on different interoperability aspects.

In the I-ESA 08 arena the industry will point out the difficulties encountered in their business life and show the way taken to solve those problems while interrelate with other organizations sharing experience. The industry will be able to meet interoperability experts and learn from them about emerging new solutions and even establish relationships for further research and development and problem solving. Special sessions will address industrial interoperability issues for large scale industry like Automotive and Aeronautic and medium as well as small sized ones like Furniture. I-ESA´08 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 and e-Business".

Detailed information can be found at the event home page.