Business terms: Model for a Telecom operator business view of SLA

The rapidly growing service-oriented economy has highlighted key challenges and opportunities in ICT-supported service and product lifecycle management. From a service consumer point of view there is no standardized way to locate, evaluate, negotiate and monitor services. Composition of third party services is fraught with uncertainty due to absence of definitive SLAs. Moreover, there is a lack of a standardized, homogenized and extended-used model for a set of business terms for SLAs that allows an automatic negotiation of products with customers and with third parties. So, from the service provider perspective, creating customized service offerings, negotiating with individual customers, and translating from business requirements into specific internal provisioning manifestations consumes valuable time and resources. Furthermore, there is no mean to create attractive products composed by several different services coming from different domains and consolidate the underlying SLAs in a business customer-faced SLA. Ultimately, the service marketplace is frustrating and cumbersome for both service providers and consumers: a significant opportunity has arisen for a holistic SLA-management framework, able to understand and manage such a set of integrated and homogenized set of business parameters.