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Empowering the Service Economy with SLA-aware Infrastructures

Project description


Service and Software Architectures, Infrastructures and Engineering
SLA@SOI is researching the systematic management of service-oriented infrastructures on the basis of formally specified service level agreements (SLAs).
 

SLA@SOI is researching the systematic management of service-oriented economy likely to replace the whole product-oriented economy in short time. These service-oriented infrastructures are based on formally specified service level agreements (SLAs). SLA is the formalisation of a negotiated agreement between two parties. It is a written contract between customers and providers that fixes the parties' expectations concerning the quality of the services defined by the availability, performance or other attributes of them.

 

SLA@SOI: a major evolution Milestone

 

The project is a major milestone for further evolution of a service-oriented economy and the conveyance of IT-supported service provisioning which is currently of major relevance in all industries and domains. IT-based services can be flexibly traded as economic goods, i.e. under well-defined and dependable conditions and with clearly associated costs. This will allow for dynamic value networks that can be realised flexibly and thus, drive innovation and competitiveness.

SLA@SOI will provide three major benefits as regards the provisioning of services:

* Predictability and dependability

* Transparent SLA management

* In-depth guidance for industrial stakeholders

* Open reference case which allows for stakeholders to return, revalidate and modify SLA experiments.

* Automation

 

Business Benefits:

 

All the main stakeholders in a service-oriented economy will benefit from the project results:

* Software providers

* Service providers

* Service aggregators

* Service customers

 

Main innovative features of the project:

 

* An automated e-contracting framework

* Systematic grounding of SLAs from the business level down to the infrastructure

* Exploitation of virtualisation technologies at infrastructure level for SLA enforcement

* Advanced engineering methodologies for creation of predictable and manageable services.

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.

Call for proposal

FP7-ICT-2007-1
See other projects for this call

Coordinator

SAP SE
EU contribution
€ 2 370 399,00
Address
DIETMAR HOPP ALLEE 16
69190 Walldorf
Germany

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Region
Baden-Württemberg Karlsruhe Rhein-Neckar-Kreis
Activity type
Private for-profit entities (excluding Higher or Secondary Education Establishments)
Administrative Contact
Wolfgang Theilmann (Dr.)
Links
Total cost
No data

Participants (13)