Editorial: A message from the new Editor-in-Chief (2013)

T HE fi eld of services computing has evolved into a well-recognized discipline in computing, bridging information technology services and conventional business services.Services computing covers the science and technology of packaging and delivering computing functionality, spanning hardware, software, and applications layers as a suite of self-describing and autonomous functional components and tools that are interoperable through a variety of service delivery models.An important goal of services computing is to enable computing technology and information technology to be delivered and managed as services to advance and empower business services with ultimate elasticity and effi cacy.We are entering a new era of computing, with services computing as a cornerstone, interweaved by an exciting collection of technological revolutions from multimedia computing, pervasive computing, and social computing to cloud computing and big data computing.I am honored to have been elected as the new Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC) at this exciting time and for the opportunity to serve and shepherd the community's premier publication venue in its next milestone.Since its inception in 2008, under the leadership of founding EIC Dr. Liang-Jie Zhang, TSC has grown to be a fl agship publication for research results in the core technology of services computing, including serviceoriented architecture, web services, mashups, cloud computing, software as a service, business consulting methodology and utilities, and business process modeling, transformation, and integration.I am also thankful to Dr. Liang-Jie Zhang and the steering committee of the IEEE Services Congress (co-located multiconferences including ICWS, SCC, and IEEE Cloud), which have nurtured and fueled TSC with cutting-edge research contributions in Services Computing from a diverse set of active researchers as well as practitioners worldwide.Moving forward, I would like to continue exploring opportunities of making TSC an exciting and defi nitive forum for attracting and publishing impactful research contributions that are transformative.For example, as information digitization becoming ubiquitous, the relevance of academic journals is being challenged by highly selective conferences as alternative venues for high quality research.It is worth examining the opportunities for and challenges to making TSC serve not only as an archival journal that will provide a historical perspective of research development but also as a forum for disseminating timely and exciting ongoing research that can stimulate innovation.To achieve such a promise for TSC, several directions are worth pursuing, including seeking ways to reach the broadest possible readership over time, broadening the scope of TSC from core technology and concepts in services computing.TSC will cover all areas of services computing, especially emerging technologies, such as data storage technology, green computing or energyeffi cient computing technology, and data analytics as a service to name a few.Furthermore, we will explore ways to shorten both the submission-review-decision cycle and the acceptance-to-publication production cycle.I would like to conclude by emphasizing the importance of all the contributors to TSC: the editorial board, the reviewers, the authors, the IEEE Computer Society staff, and the production crews.Their active contributions and dedication are critical for TSC to continue its success.Together with my predecessor, Dr. Liang-Jie Zhang,