Enterprise IT as a Service: Transforming the Delivery Model of IT Services

Enterprises are under great pressure to be nimble and adjust quickly to ever shifting business priorities and constantly evolving technologies. This is usually seen as a driver to adopt Cloud technologies, however, the existing large investments in on premise IT infrastructure and data residency constraints combined with decreasing IT budgets precludes a fast and immediate migration to public or private clouds, hence the realization that Hybrid IT environment are here to stay for a while, making the efficient management of hybrid IT environments extremely critical. The pressure of decreasing IT budgets also precludes the high cost of investment in traditional tools and systems to manage those environments. This has resulted in the rise of an on-demand software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to manage these hybrid clouds. However, these SaaS solutions are typically delivered as island solutions and lack some of the characteristics that SaaS solutions in this space should exhibit in order to provide an efficient Enterprise IT management eco-system. In this paper, we first present the set of properties that SaaS solutions must exhibit in order to become part of the eco-system and describe the architecture of a platform where those SaaS solutions can operate and integrate with each other. We present the challenges of building such a platform, and how our architecture addresses these challenges. We showcase how we are leveraging this platform to transform a large service management provider's IT services to fit this new paradigm.