Article history: Received 26 April 2010 Accepted 18 January 2011 Available online 21 February 2011 IT-based Service Economy requires Service Markets to flourish for the trade of services. A market does not represent a simple buyer-seller relationship, rather it is the culmination point of a complex chain of stake-holders with a hierarchical integration of value along each point in the chain. To...

In this paper we propose a new approach for service-oriented enterprise application integration (EAI). Unlike current EAI solutions, which mainly focus on technological aspects, our approach allows business domain experts to get more involved in the integration process. First, we provide a technique for modeling application services at a sufficiently high level of abstraction for business exper...

Next Generation Grids aim at attracting commercial users to employ Grid environments for their business critical compute jobs. These customers demand for contractually fixed service quality levels, ensuring the availability of results in time In this context, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a powerful instrument for defining a comprehensive requirement profile. Numerous research projects wor...

Security and data integrity are important aspects in the fields of Grid and cluster computing. However, security usually incurs a certain amount of performance degradation and adds usage complexity to a field of computing where performance is crucial and usage complexity is already high. The growing popularity of Grid computing is leading to vastly different security requirements. While some Gr...

Die dauerhafte Funktionsfähigkeit der IT-Infrastruktur stellt eine notwendige Bedingung für die Verstetigung von E-Learning in den Hochschulen dar. Um die IT-Organisation zu einer Serviceeinrichtung umzubauen, gehört neben der stärkeren Kundenorientierung auch eine Definition der zu erbringenden Services, anhand derer sich auf Basis von Kennzahlen Aussagen über Qualität und Vergleichbarkeit abl...

The emergence of service analysis, design, architectures and solutions presented in service marketing and software engineering literature has created a need for understanding the nature of services. Services are often considered as possessing characteristics that are assumed to pose specific problems for service providers as opposed to providers of goods. This paper presents an ontological inte...

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) represents an agreement between a service user and a provider in the context of a particular service provision. SLAs contain Quality of Service properties that must be maintained by a provider. These are generally defined as a set of Service Level Objectives (SLOs). These properties need to be measurable and must be monitored during the provision of the service t...

Principles of software evaluation can be used for quality assessment and measurement for networked services and distributed applications. A specific method for measuring important service characteristics is therefore presented. The method and the measurement procedure allows to compare the actual characteristics of service quality with the required characteristics and thresholds. The approach c...

Contractual relation between customers and telecommunications service providers are becoming increasingly complex, due largely to changes in the marketplace and growth in the number and complexity of services on offer. In order to guarantee a certain quality of offered service and in response to customer needs, some mechanisms of service level management must be applied. The service level manag...

A s the role of information technology continues to grow, firms are frequently turning to information systems outsourcing to achieve operational and strategic goals. When outsourcing succeeds, firms can enjoy significant operations savings, access to new technologies, and flexibility in strategic decisions. This success, however, is by no means guaranteed—the Gartner Group estimates that half t...