Second ITEA Achievement Award
Amsterdam, 10 October 2002
2002 ITEA Achievement award press
release
word-document - 216 kB
Information Technology for European Advancement - ITEA - is Europe's premier cooperative programme for pre-competitive R&D, aiming at strengthening European industry by establishing leadership in embedded and distributed software.
The major companies that participate in ITEA share a vision of how to spread the use of digital software technology in the home, in businesses, on the move, in services and in software creation itself. This vision is embodied in ITEA projects, which further the fortunes of European industry by helping to develop the technology behind crucial applications.
The projects focus on building platforms and/or APIs, proposing new architectures, and producing de facto or de jure standards. They provide the basis for the next generation of products, systems, appliances and services that will be produced and sold worldwide by European companies.
This huge effort can only succeed with full European cooperation at all levels. Besides the ITEA founding companies, many others are involved, in particular SME start-ups backed by European National Public Authorities. Start-up companies and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises are also key partners in this innovation challenge, as are universities and research institutes.
The ITEA Board has set up the ITEA Achievement Award to highlight outstanding examples of the ITEA programme. These are high-level technical contributions based on true European collaboration that lead to significant results and thus further promote the programme and its goals.
The 2002 ITEA Achievement Award
Each year this prestigious honour highlights a concrete
example of best practice by acknowledging a highly successful project. A major factor in deciding this
year's award was exploitation. As ITEA aims to make Europe's industry more competitive by developing
software-intensive systems, effective industrial exploitation of the results of projects is clearly crucial.
These results can be used in various ways, for example via:
- implementation of standards & the adoption and diffusion of platforms
- services based on the software, including those used within industries
- use of the software in basic network operations
- licensing & spin-offs
- product sales (direct, in packages or via OEMs)
All ITEA projects completed since the last symposium were found to be good according to these criteria and three were found to be excellent. The Board finally selected PEPiTA (Platform for Enhanced Provisioning of Terminal Independent Applications) as an outstanding example of effective exploitation. PEPiTA was created by a consortium of Irish, Czech and Belgium participants, led by a French company, who together developed essential middleware resulting in a generic platform for providing application services to a broad range of terminals including mobile phones, smart cards and computers. It includes an Application Programming Interface (API) for virtual services and an Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) platform for application services. This middleware helps companies connect their applications to a range of terminals, thus reducing the complexity of target applications and speeding up time to market. Highlights of PEPiTA are:
- Project results are being integrated into products/platforms, services and systems delivered by participants, both major industries and SMEs. Several companies have directly used PEPiTA results:
- The Access to Services features in Alcatel's Intelligent Networks platform (ALMAP).
- Evidian released the PortalXpert product, which uses work done on a security gateway, which offers single sign-on for Web access to enterprises, without deploying software on users' computers or web servers.
- Bantry Technologies integrated PEPiTA smart card services into its Virtuocash payment product line.
- Schlumberger integrated PEPiTA's Java Card tools components in its development tools (Odyssee2 Lab), as well as PEPiTA's cryptography components in their IT products Crypto Services.
- The platform is referenced on the ObjectWeb site (www.objectweb.org), which distributes it as an open source under the name JonAS (so far more than 15,000 hits per day and 50,000 kernels downloaded).
- The project has actively contributed to European and international standard organisations such as 3GPP, ETSI, IETF, and Java standardisation groups.
- The PEPiTA kernel is already taught in University curricula.
For more information, please contact:
Anne van der Linden
PR/Communications
ITEA Office
Tel: +31 (0)40 247 5590
Fax: +31 (0)40 247 5595
Email:
[email protected]
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