Managing eBusiness on Demand SLA Contracts in Business Terms Using the Cross-SLA Execution Manager SAM Melissa Buco, Rong Chang, Laura Luan, Chris Ward, Joel Wolf, and Philip Yu IBM T.J. Watson Research Center 19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532, USA {mjbuco,rong,luan,cw1,jlwolf,psyu}@us.ibm.com Tevfik Kosar Syed Umair Shah Dept. of Computer Science Computer Science Department University of Wisconsin-Madison Carnegie Mellon University 1210 West Dayton Street, Madison, WI 53706 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 kosart@cs.wisc.edu umair@cs.cmu.edu Abstract It is imperative for a competitive e-business service provider to be positioned to manage the execution of its service level agreement (SLA) contracts in business terms (e.g., minimizing financial penalties for service-level violations, maximizing service-level measurement based customer satisfaction metrics). This paper briefly describes the design rationale of an integrated set of business- oriented service level management (SLM) technologies under development in the SAM project at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. The e-business SLA execution manager SAM, (1) enables the provider to deploy an effective means of capturing and managing contractual SLA data as well as provider-facing non-contractual SLM data; (2) assists service personnel to prioritize the processing of action-demanding quality management alerts as per the provider’s SLM objectives; and (3) automates the prioritization and execution management of approved SLM processes on behalf of the provider, including assigning SLM tasks to service personnel. 1: Introduction In recent years it has become increasingly desirable for companies to outsource the development and management of their e-business applications and/or processes to leverage rapid innovations in Web computing technologies and mitigate the serious worldwide shortage of information technology (IT) skills. Various e-business service providers (e.g., ASP’s, ISP’s, MSP’s, xSP’s) are evolving to help these e-business companies to focus on the growth of their core competency in a cost-effective manner. One mechanism to improve their competitiveness is to manage service functions and qualities in business terms based on the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) signed with customers. An SLA is a contract that specifies the minimum expectations and obligations that exist between a service provider and a service customer [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. An e-business SLA contract specifies, among others, the outsourced service functions, service quality measurement criteria, service-level evaluation rules, and ramifications of failing to meet (or indeed exceeding) quality standards (or service-level targets, SLTs). SLTs in an SLA contract can be stated based upon objective quantitative measurement of computing system availability or performance (e.g., monthly availability of Individual Web Server will be no less than 99.7%) or business process efficiency or effectiveness (e.g., no less than 93% of Severity 1 problems are responded within 30 minutes monthly). The refund policies for service-level violations can be specified relative to the service cost (e.g., credit customer one day of the service cost if the outsourced e-business infrastructure is unavailable more than 15 minutes a day) or in absolute terms (e.g., credit customer two thousand dollars if a monthly average network latency across the provider ISP access links to the ISP’s backbone is higher than 95 milliseconds). From the provider’s viewpoint, offering a few sets of customer-neutral service functions atop a common service delivery infrastructure exploits economy of