Capability-as-a-Service: Towards Context Aware Business Services

In industrial areas with a highly competitive environment all enterprise functions are expected to contribute to efficient operations and an economic cost structure. Service-orientation and cloud computing offer approaches to achieve more efficiency in the use of computing resources and more flexibility with respect to outsourcing strategies. The systematic management of the capabilities of an enterprise, which often are reflected in the business services offered to customers and the technical services associated to them, is emerging into a key activity for achieving efficiency, which would require to move from business process or software as a service (BPaaS, SaaS) to capabilities as a service (CaaS). In order to facilitate capability management, we propose business service design explicitly considering delivery context by an approach that supports modeling both, the service as such and the application context. The main contributions of this paper are (1) an industrial case offering platform, software and business as a service and motivating another abstraction layer, (2) the concept of Capability-as-a-Service including methodical aspects and technology for delivery, and (3) an initial model for capabilities for the industrial case, i.e. a feasibility study.