Many companies in the world are participating in the Internet-based economy to ensure a prosperous future.  It has become increasingly desirable for these companies to outsource the development and/or management of their Internet-based e-business applications/processes due to rapid innovations in Web computing technologies and a serious worldwide shortage of information technology (IT) skills.  Various e-business-on-demand service providers (e.g., ASP’s, ISP’s, MSP’s, xSP’s) are evolving to help these e-business companies to cost-efficiently focus on the growth of their core competency.

A service level agreement (SLA) is a legal contract that specifies the minimum expectations and obligations that exist between a service provider and a service customer.  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).  An SLT can be stated based upon an objective quantitative measurement of the availability/performance of an IT system (e.g., monthly availability of individual Web server will be no less than 99.7%) or the efficiency/effectiveness of an operations support service (OSS) and/or a business support service (BSS) process (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).

SAM is an SLA contract execution manager under development at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.  It enables an e-business-on-demand service provider (like IGS) to deploy a unified approach to fulfilling its service-level management (SLM) commitments to all of its SLA contracts in business terms (e.g., minimizing financial penalties for service-level violations, maximizing service-level measurement based customer satisfaction metrics, etc.).  Its SLM technologies would, among others, (1) enable the provider to possess an effective means of capturing and managing contractual SLM-related SLA data as well as non-contractual internal SLM data; (2) assist service personnel to prioritize the processing of action-demanding quality management alerts as per the provider’s business-oriented SLM objectives; and (3) automate the prioritization and execution management of single-/multi-task SLM processes/workflows, including assigning SLM tasks to service personnel or software agents, according to business objectives.