Editorial: Services Computing in 2016

IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC) will celebrate its ninth anniversary in 2016. In the first issue of 2016, I would like to report the achievements of TSC to our readers, authors, reviewers, TSC editorial board and TSC executive advisory board. First, TSC has gained its impact factor of 3.049 and its five-year impact factor of 3.181, which places TSC in the elite class of highly ranked peer reviewed journals in both IEEE publications and other international journal publications. Second, TSC has enjoyed its first year in 2015 as a bi-monthly journal and publishes every twomonths and six issues annually, instead of quarterly from 2008-2014. This helps TSC to reduce the time from acceptance to publication for all accepted papers. Third, the number of submissions TSC receives continues to grow. In response to the growing community, including both authors and readers, as of December 2015, TSC editorial board has 48 distinguished associate editors, including 12 IEEE Fellows, 1 ACM Fellow, 5 AAAS Fellows, and 2 members of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea). Three associate editors have joined the TSC editorial boards in 2015: Carl K. Chang, Derek L. Nazareth, and Eleni Stroulia. All associate editors will serve one term of two years with renewal of another term. Five associate editors are retiring in January 2016: M. Brian Blake fromDrexel University, Athman Bouguettaya fromRMIT university inAustralia,Michael Rung-Tsong Lyu from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Louis Moser from UCSB, and Wil M.P. van der Aalst from Twente University, The Netherlands. On behalf of TSC executive advisory board, I thank them for their services and contributions to the growth of TSC. Finally, Dr. RongN. Chang from IBMTJWatson has been appointed to serve as an Associate Editor-in-Chief since Fall 2015. Services computing research is entering an exciting time. Data has been the number 1 fast growing phenomenon on the Internet for the last decade with the emergence of Big Data and Internet of Things. Engineering big data analytics demands significant advances in delivering data analysis as a service (DAaaS). Although we have witnessed numerous hardware infrastructures, computing platforms and software applications being offered as outsourced and managed services, big data analytics have not yet been packaged and outsourced as large scale “dialtone” services due to 1) the complexity and high cost involved in using conventional analytic platforms and tools to connect big data with rich models of analytics, 2) the need for innovative approaches to perform cross-layer and cross-network correlation and knowledge discovery, and 3) the lack of support for elastic and multi-tenant analytics that can seamlessly scale with the exponential growth of big data and the evolving demands of analytic applications. In 2016, TSCwill continue to improve the coverage of cutting-edge Services Computing research, including featuring the special topic sections in its regular issues and continuing to attract contributions to its surveys section. We will engage new efforts on pursuing business and enterprise perspectives in services computing and encouraging research efforts on delivering data analytics as a service in business, science and engineering disciplines. For example, a special section entitled “In Search of a New Alignment in Service Research” will appear in one of the 2016 TSC issues, with the guest editors from business management, services research and computer science: Michael Goul, a professor and chair of the business school in Arizona State University, and a member of TSC executive advisor board members, Paul Maglio, the Editor-in-Chief of INFORMS Service Science and Patrick Hung, a member of the TSC editorial board. We expect such type of special issues to help broaden the scope of TSC and attract readership and authorship from business and management community. I am very pleased with the milestones that TSC has achieved in 2015. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the continual contributions from the authors, readers, reviewers, TSC advisory board members, TSC editorial board members, the staff of IEEE and IEEE Computer Society, especially Ms. Christine Kurzawa. They have made significant contributions to every success that TSC has made to date, including maintaining the average review cycle of two to three months and the average queuing time of six-eight months for accepted papers to appear. I would like to wish you a happy and successful 2016. As always, we love to hear your suggestions and comments on the ways to improve TSC in 2015. I look forward to your continued support as an author, a reader, a reviewer, and a volunteer.