Making IT all work together enabling new business models in the web of everything

Over the last few years the rise of cloud, mobile and social technologies has driven the influence of the Web into traditional value chains, digitizing many transactional and social interactions and opening up opportunities for new business models. At the same time new initiatives such as 6LoWPAN and CoAP are pushing the edges of the Web even further out, opening up opportunities to digitize and socialize the millions of sensors and other physical devices operating at the edge of the network. Without some form of convergence in the platforms necessary to leverage these new components, however, such developments will struggle to hit critical mass with peer to peer arrangements alone unable to cope with the complexities of integrating a wide and highly divergent set of resources. In this paper we discuss the ways in which we have been extending our cloud platform within the framework of the IoT6 European research project to enable the seamless integration of these new components as they join the global network