IBM on Wednesday said it was establishing a consortium with the European Union and universities to research new cloud-computing models to reduce the cost of hosting and maintaining Internet-based services.

The consortium will undertake research that could lead to the development of new computer science models that bring together managed Internet-based services from diverse hardware and software environments in a flexible cloud environment, IBM said in a statement.

The new design and deployment models could help cut costs compared with conventional models, which are complex and require significant time and cost to maintain, IBM said. The current systems are not flexible and need to be manually customized for services to communicate and work together. The researchers hope to establish a framework to cut down the design and deployment time for such services by hosting them in a central cloud environment.

More: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178958/