The ongoing transformation of a product-oriented economy towards a service-oriented economy has come to a critical point. IT-supported service provisioning is of major relevance in all industries and domains. However, the nature of these setups is typically quite static because it requires significant effort to create service offers, to negotiate provisioning details with customers and to manage and control provided services.
The research project SLA@SOI will provide a major milestone for the further evolution towards a service-oriented economy, where IT-based services can be flexibly traded as economic good, i.e. under well defined and dependable conditions and with clearly associated costs. Eventually, this will allow for dynamic value networks that can be flexibly instantiated thus driving innovation and competitiveness.
The technical approach of SLA@SOI is to define a holistic view for the management of service level agreements (SLAs) and to implement an SLA management framework that can be easily integrated into a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI). The main innovative features of the project are (1) an automated e-contracting framework, (2) systematic grounding of SLAs from the business level down to the infrastructure, (3) exploitation of virtualization technologies at infrastructure level for SLA enforcement, and (4) advanced engineering methodologies for creation of predictable and manageable services.
SLA@SOI will provide its results in 2 complementing ways. First, an open source based SLA management framework will allow for realizing the benefits of predictability, transparency and automation in an arbitrary service-oriented infrastructure. Second, in-depth guidance for industrial stakeholders will be given explaining the best practise on how to transform their service business into an SLA-driven one.
SLA@SOI comprises representative world-class players in academia and industry required for materializing the vision of this ambitious project.