Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
tools to manage fast-growing user communities. The online gaming industry can
expect very fluctuating demands with gaming peaks and lows and irregular usage
patterns. To address this, Service Providers (SP) could partner and support game
developers to remove the infrastructure burden from them (Total Telecom Magazine
2009) and let them focus on what developers do best - write appealing, highly-
interactive, and richly featured games for users to enjoy. SPs would then bring the
hosting know-how along with support for a wide array of non-functional require-
ments such as security and Quality of Service (QoS).
With this in mind, this Business Experiment has analysed the current state of
the art (see sect. 12.1.2). It designed a new architecture that supports online gaming
providers. It also unlocks internal capabilities at different SP sites to offer them
externally as Value-Adding Services (VAS). Such VAS can include billing services,
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or VoIP services (BT 2009b). This has
given birth to the Virtual Hosting Environment (VHE) (see sect. 12.2). The VHE
is a service-oriented modular architecture able to deliver extensible, flexible, and
adaptive scenarios both for online gaming and other service-oriented businesses.
Indeed, online gaming is not the only area that can benefit from the VHE. Any
enterprise wishing to embrace the Internet and offer capabilities as a service could
benefit from the VHE. Today's organisations are undergoing major changes in
the way they conduct business. This requires their IT infrastructure be rethought.
Enterprises are increasingly pervasive with a mobile workforce, a rising number
of business collaborations with other organisations, and a rising number of exter-
nalized infrastructure and services. Many services not seen as core to the business
are being outsourced. This is the case for instance of CRM, communications tools
(email, VOIP, virtual intranets), and even mission-critical applications such as secu-
rity. In fact, it is estimated that in the light of today's growing complexity, Small and
Medium Enterprises (SMEs) will no longer be able to afford to implement some of
the business functions they need and should resort to third-party solutions. In partic-
ular, this is the case with security (McAfee 2006). Even worse, many SMEs may not
be correctly assessing the risks involved in doing online business while at the same
time they “have become very reliant on the Internet” (McAfee 2006). Online access
and availability has become very important to the running of businesses.
12.1.2 Limitations of the Current Solution
Current gaming platforms and online gaming providers are built on top of a very
static architecture: each online gaming provider buys, runs, and manages its own
dedicated game servers. This requires a large initial investment for any new entrant
and makes it harder to penetrate the market. It also entails high running costs both
from a management and operation aspect as from a maintenance and hardware
aspect. In addition, it is extremely difficult to correctly scale the infrastructure
as online gaming targets millions of users that will often connect from the same
geographical region at roughly the same time for variable periods of time. This
generates extreme peaks and lows in demand that impact gaming performance, QoS
and ultimately user experience and satisfaction. It shifts the load across the entire
