Günther Gerlach

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written by gunther gerlach-2009

In wider spanning service ecosystems, several service providers may offer functionally replaceable services that differ in their extra-functional characteristics, such as usage terms and quality of service delivery. Service providers need to be responsive – potentially in real-time – to negotiate variations of service delivery requirements (e.g., price, deliverable timetable). Service ecosystems should therefore explicitly support the negotiation process, reducing non-critical human involvement and providing decision-makers with the information they require to formulate and assess service offers.

Gunther Gerlach

written by gunther gerlach-2009

Internet commerce has created newer forms of service interactions than traditional marketplace transactions. Amazon/UKOnline, single-consumer-to-service transactions – e.g., making customer listings, doing basic look-ups and verification checks, and purchasing goods – are giving way to more distributed, pull-oriented and data streaming modes of interaction on the web. Marketplace auctions, voting, and subscription-based RSS feeds are enhancing wider spans of participants and semistructured, audio and video data in conventional transactional forms.

Gunther Gerlach

written by gunther gerlach-2009

Current provisions for discovery are based on keyword searches through repositories. Keywords are nominated by service providers through publication and advertising features of software as a service (SaaS) functions. Details of message inputs, outputs, and methods are also captured from WSDL file scans and factored into searches.

Such discovery techniques are suitable in tightly coupled and well-scoped domains where service consumers can determine what services offer and how they can be independently utilized from search results. In other words, users are expected to know what they want before they search.

Gunther Gerlach

written by gunther gerlach-2009

As seen through this section, web service ecosystems can generally be described as a logical collection of web services whose exposure and access are subject to constraints, which are characteristic of business service delivery. A lower level analogy can be found with application servers, where access and inter-operation of components is regulated by middleware functions such as discovery/brokering, remote access, object pooling, transactions, asynchronous messaging, persistence management, and so on.

Gunther Gerlach

written by gunther gerlach-2009

As web services technologies mature, and commercial-scale, service oriented architectures shift from early adoption to mainstream development, a new revolution of service orientation is emerging. Beyond the orchestration of web services in multi-party business processes, a dedicated treatment for procuring web services into different markets is coming into focus.

The first beneficiaries of open procurements of web services are ventures having successfully overcome the dotcom-burst such as Salesforce, StrikeIron, and GrandCentral. These companies leverage XML-based technology to consolidate enterprise application portfolios built by independent software developers for the small to medium markets. Their early successes are paving the way to long-anticipated Amazon/eBay-style marketplaces for web services.

Gunther Gerlach

written by gunther gerlach-2009

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has gained mainstream acceptance as a strategy for consolidating and repurposing legacy applications to be combined with new applications in more dynamic environments, through self-contained, reusable, and configurable services. As fostered through the web services standards stack, services, once in place, can interoperate with other services, be composed into long-running business processes, spanning intra- and inter-organizational boundaries, and be procured through different business domains and market sectors. As web services are exposed and connected with one another, they give rise to service ecosystems.

Gunther Gerlach