Over the past years, Service-Oriented Architectures have become a paradigm in enterprises for enabling more efficient and flexible business processes and addressing some of the technological challenges posed by the service-based economy. Using loosely coupled services, they allow for discovery, composition and orchestration capabilities that are needed by end-users, business processes or other services.

In parallel with these developments, research on Grid Technologies has expanded from its initial focus on complex eScience applications towards general-purpose service infrastructures that can also be used by business and industry. This requires the dynamic provision of resources in an easy and transparent manner thus greatly facilitating the translation of business or user requirements into infrastructure capabilities. The business aim is on the convergence with the service paradigm so that the infrastructure can be managed according to more flexible and dynamic business practices. This has opened new avenues of research in Software and Services that complement the research that is being done on Grids for scientific computations and on the deployment of research infrastructures for eScience.

In this talk I will present the research on Software and Services within the FP6 and FP7 programmes of the European Commission, with particular emphasis on the activities related to service oriented infrastructures and Grids. I will also provide an overview of the expected research priorities in the coming years.