Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
for a greatly reduced capital outlay, and increasing utilisation of the IT resource.
Implementing a service-oriented design facilitates increased collaboration with both
customers and suppliers, and offers opportunities for a higher degree of service
composition and process automation across the value chain. The VHE also offers
common capabilities meeting non-functional requirements such as:
• Business collaboration management,
• Service publication, service categorization and discovery based on high-level
QoS requirements,
• Process driven service composition,
• Federated identity and access management,
• SLA monitoring and evaluation, and
• Secure messaging and content validation, content-based routing.
This experiment validates the use of VHE as an enabler of collaborative online
gaming services. Validation is achieved by implementing a gaming platform
(provided by Andago) on the top of a VHE specialisation for on-line collaborative
gaming. The VHE helps businesses to improve their “concept-to-market” develop-
ment cycle. This is achieved by leveraging the common capability integration and
process-driven service and resource composition that is enabled by the VHE infra-
structure. The VHE should enable a 25% - 50% reduction of the concept-to-market
cycle, especially in cases where services are composed for the first time in response
to a new market need (Sawnhey 2005). The VHE should also help businesses opti-
mise their “right first time” ratio by leveraging the flexibility offered by policy-
based management of the VHE infrastructure and its ability for autonomic adapta-
tion in response to contextual changes. The VHE should allow an 80% or higher
“right first time” ratio for exposing composite services on the VHE, especially in
cases where reconfiguration is required in order to respond to changes of service
usage or access requirements (Sawnhey 2005). The VHE proposition offers the
potential to treat both IT and business functions as a series of interconnected serv-
ices—from activities like HR and travel that serve employees, to sales, to managing
customer identity and access, to delivery and other activities that serve customers.
It offers organisations new ways to selectively outsource, to quickly configure and
reconfigure these services to continually maximize efficiency, even as their busi-
ness world changes.
From a customer's perspective SOI provides a very compelling story, incor-
porating the attractive aspects of SOA with flexible, cost effective infrastructure.
Current estimates (IDC 2006) are that between 50 - 80% of enterprises are planning
and deploying SOA to achieve the following:
• S
ervice reuse
: accelerated implementation of new business functions and
changes to existing ones, lower effort and risk, reduced cost, quicker implemen-
tation;
• C
omposite applications built by combining services
:
Rapid response
to changing
market requirements and
first-to-market
competitive advantage.
Optimization of
end-to-end processes
rather than just individual activities
