Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), as a key architectural pattern for prompt and rapid integration, is today a cornerstone of the agile Information Technology (IT) wave. Indeed, although SOA may sometimes be felt as just one more buzzword, it must be kept in mind that most of today's greatest successes, in terms of bringing agility to the whole enterprise through its IT backbone, have been provided by SOA and its major technological counterparts that are the Web Services and the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). In this field, agility must be understood as "the combination of speed and adaptability: speed to bring new solutions to market more quickly, and adaptability to new business requirements and competitive pressure".

To tackle these three aspects, ITEmIS provides: a service-oriented middleware achieving deployment, run-time integration, and administration of the heterogeneous IT/embedded services into ITEmIS systems; and Model Driven Engineering (MDE)-based meta-models and tools for the modelling, development, deployment, administration and correctness verification of IT/embedded services and ITEmIS systems. ITEmIS goals towards enabling ITEmIS systems are highly challenging due to their special requirements deriving from the extreme heterogeneity of their constituent IT/embedded systems and their increased need for scalability and agility.

Overall, ITEmIS aims at establishing an abstract reference system architecture, a methodology, and a set of algorithms (transformed into tools, mechanisms, protocols and correctness verification algorithms) for realizing ITEmIS systems. Due to its nature and objectives, ITEmIS should not be technology-specific and should enable integrating any new technology into the ITEmIS architecture. Nevertheless, in order to ensure proper exploitation opportunities, ITEmIS has a strong commitment in reusing today's state-of-the-art standard technologies concerning the ESB infrastructure, the MDE/component-based design and development tooling, and the embedded-oriented lightweight component technologies. Thus, ITEmIS largely reuses current ANR-funded platforms leveraging the best of current industrial and academic know-how:
* Flex-eWare ([http://www.flex-eware.org|http://www.flex-eware.org/]) provides the Lightweight CORBA Component Model (CCM) infrastructure,