The Increasing Role of Service Level Agreements in B2B Systems

Service orientated architectures (SOA will support a dynamic market in commodity services and enable business to drive down costs and respond faster and flexibly to changing markets. Virtualisation delivers similar benefits for the management of resources. If viable business models for the combination of these two technologies can be found, a true commodity grid can become reality. An essential principle of any viable business model will be to secure the flexibility for service providers to manage and provision services. The provider consumer relationship is encapsulated within a service level agreement (SLA). We propose that this SLA contains terms that only relate to business level objectives (BLO). Deployment and management details of a service are hidden by virtualisation in the provider’s domain and therefore should not be expressed in the SLA. The SLA will become key to build confidence in the business relationship between provider and consumer and a differentiating factor between providers in a market place.