12th GI/ITG CONFERENCE ON MEASURING, MODELLING AND EVALUATION OF COMPUTER AND COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS 3rd POLISH-GERMAN TELETRAFFIC SYMPOSIUM TRENDS AND DEVELOPMENTS IN ICT INDUSTRY: NEW CHALLENGES FOR PERFORMANCE ANALYSTS

In the next few years the landscape of the information and communications technology (ICT) industry will be subject to many changes. New and advanced ICT services will be brought to the market, offered over large and highly distributed infrastructures consisting of a heterogeneity of information systems and communication networks, each owned by different parties. The business of many companies will increasin gly depend on the performance of their ICT systems. T he unbundling of the telecommunications world will become reality, the classical role models and value chains will be subject to change, and third party service providers will enter the market. Network and service providers will need to negotiate Service Level Agreements (SLA's) in order to offer high and predictable service levels to their customers in a cost -effective manner. In this paper we give an overview of trends and development in the ICT industry, and address new research challenges for performance analysts, both for practitioners and theorists.