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InfoQ Homepage News New SOA-EERP Standards to Establish Service Quality, Rating and SLA

New SOA-EERP Standards to Establish Service Quality, Rating and SLA

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OASIS SOA-EERP Technical Committee has just announced a 60 day Public Review of the three draft specifications:

 

 

As defined in OASIS SOA-EERP whitepaper, End-to-End Resource Planning (EERP) Model and Use Case this set of specifications applies to

... service discovery, composition, simulation, and optimization techniques in a novel way to improve business results. As the software industry has applied SOA to eBusiness deployments, self-optimizing systems... have become more feasible and more useful... Modeling the business characteristics of a service is a prerequisite for estimating the business value of the process that uses those services; likewise, the reliability of the service provided needs to be understood. Finally, establishing agreements about the business service is essential to long-term value chain improvement.

The overall vision of the SOA-EERP technical committee is the creation of service "exchanges" to which service consumers can go to get an optimal set of services required for their need. Many service providers participating in the exchange may provide a similar service but with different business quality of service (bQoS) and Ratings. Ratings are provided by participating Rating Providers, for example, a third party rating organization, and can be issued either a number or a classification description. Finally, an EERP Portal accepts requests from a service requester, performs bQoS and rating queries, calculates optimal solution(s), and then returns the result to the respective service requester.

A set of XML vocabulary specifications, part of current review, address the exchange of information that models the business characteristics of a service, permitting assertions or queries related to the credibility of the service and its providers, and the establishment of agreements about the business service. Additional specifications can be applied to other areas. For example, bQoS may be applicable to the definition of characteristics of energy, goods bought and sold, and services such as medical, shipping, and more. The reputation (Rating) of a trading or business partner is useful in many contexts.

A bQoS specification is an XML vocabulary defined as an XML schema, allowing to specify selected business characteristics of a service. The main components of bQoS are:

  • Price or cost for the service
  • Performance, throughput and latency of the service execution
  • Quality of service ...

Business rating specification is an XML vocabulary defined as an XML schema and allowing to specify business creditability, reliability and reputation of the service providers. The main components of a business rating are:

  • A list of third party service Ratings. Each Rating contains either an aggregated numeric rating or an aggregated classification description representing the rating of the given business service.
  • Credentials that the service provider owns or holds. Such credentials may be issued by organizations regulating the service and can include licenses, permissions, certifications, associations, or affiliations...

A business service level agreement specification (SLA) is an XML vocabulary defined as an XML schema and allowing to define a business service level agreement between the service requestor and service provider. Business SLA is a formal contract between a service consumer and its provider, guaranteeing quantifiable business quality of service (bQoS) at defined levels. The main components of a business rating are:

  • Parties involved in the SLA for the service
  • Parameters of service, which can be monitored for calculating the QoS metrics
  • SLA Obligations of the service
  • SLA Terms of the service

This set of OASIS specification signifies an important step in formalizing business value of services and can be used for a better evaluation of business impact of SOA implementations.

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