Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
world at different times and would ideally require a geographically-distributed solu-
tion.
The online gaming providers' infrastructure is often poorly utilized due to archi-
tectural limitations. This can generate ongoing financial losses in addition to the
high cost of the initial investment.
Each online gaming provider also needs to implement each core function needed
for the running of its business. This includes the hosting and execution of games at the
lower end of the overall online game provision; the load balancing between different
servers; the monitoring of QoS metrics, service delivery, and customer satisfaction;
overall system security and secure messaging; and appealing rich internet applica-
tions (RIA) to manage user communities with rich content that drives the overall
business. The distributed nature of online gaming, the rising number of users and
connections greatly augments the complexity of the systems which in turn will drive
online gaming providers to design and adopt easier-to-manage solutions.
On the other hand, service providers currently often only offer communication
services, generally limited to the provision of internet and telephony to businesses.
However, Total Telecom Magazine (2009) states “service providers could have an
opportunity to take some of the infrastructure burden away from games developers
and create a new revenue stream. To date network operators have shown more than
a tentative interest in online gaming as a new revenue stream. But stellar growth
in the gaming market and signs that content companies don't want to manage the
whole service end to end, means there could be a greater opportunity for telcos to
capitalise on their infrastructure.”
The current solution doesn't easily allow for additional VAS to be plugged into
it. It is therefore difficult for SPs to provide and bill for such services. The aim of the
VHE will therefore be to offer a modular, extensible, pluggable architecture where
service providers, businesses, end users, and hosting environments can be brought
together to deliver higher-value services.
12.1.3 Requirements for a New Service-Oriented Architecture
In order to address the issues created by static architectures, there is a need to design
from scratch a new architecture that can enable the dynamic composition and expo-
sure of Software-as-Services to end customers. Requirements can be grouped into
different themes: high-level business requirements, infrastructure requirements,
service exposure requirements, governance requirements, and non-functional
requirements.
Overall, the key aim of the solution is to develop an architecture that clearly
segregates between the actual operations of a business service from the hosting
of that service, the network aspects, and the non-functional aspects. The solution
should let different providers focus on those areas where they excel.
From a high-level, business perspective, the main requirement is to achieve a
new dynamic system that allows cross-enterprise business interactions. This system
should be flexible enough so that it can accurately reflect the value chains that exist
between the different business partners. The system should offer adequate tools
