The 2011 Service Cup is the sixth episode of the series of contest. The contest opens to talented students (Students Group) and industry practitioners (Professionals Group). The contest focuses on using the SOA methodologies, solution reference architectures, and tools to solve real world problems. We choose a different theme each year, while the real world application is chosen by the participants. In the past, business SOA and mash-ups were chosen as themes. In 2011, we decide to have two themes - cloud computing and SOA . The two themes are interlinked. The teams can choose to build their application as a classic SOA system, or can explore the new potentials of Clouds.

The Service Cup aims to apply SOA and cloud computing in solving real world problems, and promote education of related techniques at undergraduate and graduate level. In the past, our participants studied a wide range of problems, from business intelligence to social software, from algorithms to developing software engineering toolkits.

New from this year, we plan to offer free resources for the participation teams to test their systems. The free hosting service is offerred by Prof. Qianxiang Wang and his team from Peking University (China). The Peking University's online platform can offer Web hosting service and virtual machine service. The platform also has safe guard mechanism to monitor the hosted systems. If the teams want to use the service, please contact us. We also offer hosting service to the teams from the past years. So people can access the systems in the service cup history.

The finalists will be invited to ICWS 2011 in USA for on-site contest. The papers of the finalists will be published in the proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Congress on Services (SERVICES 2011) which is collected in IEEE Digital Library. IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Services Computing sponsors travel awards to the top teams in final list.

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