Johannes Hintsch

The Application System Landscapes of IT Service Providers: A Multi Case Study

Achieving efficiency gains on all levels of enterprise architecture by such means as standardization has been and is a goal of researchers and practitioners working on the provisioning of IT services. At the process level, provisioning IT services is defined in common practice frameworks like the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL describes a trend where vendors offer new application systems for IT service providers with an increasingly holistic approach. However, it remains unanswered what these systems are, what the as-is situation of application system landscapes of providers is (regarding their application system mix), and if different types of providers use different types of systems. To address these questions, a case study approach was adopted: External and internal IT service providers provisioning industrial or personal services were sampled as cases, spanning all types (provider categories) within the adopted IT service provider categorization framework. We found that IT service providers from the same category have a similar mix of application systems. The paper contributes to the knowledge base by informing those who need to make pre-appraisals about a providers current application system landscape (e.g. within merger and acquisitions projects) as well as allowing practitioners to proactively construct their landscapes during market entry.

Modularization of Software as a Service Products: A Case Study of the Configuration Management Tool Puppet

With the increasing adoption of business models and technologies related to cloud computing, the business of software as a service is a growing market. Distributed computing environments with multiple hosts often require complex configuration. In order to increase operational efficiency, configuration management tools use the concept of modules, which decrease repetition in the work of system operators. These tools can be combined with ERP systems to automate the order-to-cash processes for production of software as a service products using bill of materials to represent the products in the ERP systems. In this research, the configuration management tool Puppet is studied to investigate how the concept of bill of materials maps to the module concept of Puppet by using the examples of two Puppet modules for Hadoop and Open Stack. The usage of Puppet modules in ERP system controlled and automated order-to-cash processes for complex software as a service products such as Hadoop and Open Stack can be validated, but areas of future work are also identified.

An information system architecture for build- and engineer-to-order production of application services

In manufacturing, substantial efficiency gains have been achieved through industrialization. Key concepts of industrialization include standardization, automation, and modularization. Transferring these to IT service production promises increased efficiency. ERP systems apply such concepts and have been an integrating tool for making production for manufacturers more efficient. However, previous research has considered ERP systems for IT service providers either very broadly or only from a business or technical perspective. This article investigates how to apply the ERP system concept comprehensively to a specific type of IT service provider. To this end, application services are prescribed as being composed of three types of configuration models. This helps to achieve a composition of (IT) application services that is comparable to physical parts, and it further supports their management and automated production within an ERP system. An information system architecture with the ERP system at its core is presented. It supports application service production. All relevant service lifecycle phases are considered and a consistent domain model is provided that connects business and technical layer entities. Targeted companies can improve their application service production in terms of quality and efficiency by leveraging this novel automation- and model-based approach.

Application Software in Cloud-Ready Data Centers: A Survey

The digital transformation of the economy, as well as society in general, is in large part based on data centers’ capabilities to process, store, and transport data. As the range of application requirements, the volume of data and system complexities, as well as security requirements increase, appropriate application system landscapes to support the tasks performed in a data center become crucial to success. Within this chapter we provide an overview on application software used to manage IT service production in data centers. With the advent of cloud computing, data centers increasingly face outside competition on all layers of the IT stack. Cloud service providers, such as Software as a Service companies, may even operate their own data centers. Furthermore, the people who use the investigated application software often themselves undergo an evolution from pure administrative to engineering responsibilities. Lastly, progress in the domain of application software, in general, has influenced application software discussed here. These phenomena are examined in order to compare common practice against competitive advantage of using the software from the presented taxonomy. The presented research has implications for practitioners because it provides an overview on the essential application fields of cloud-ready data centers. Additionally, the chapter contributes to the knowledge base by providing a taxonomy that is derived from a previously conducted case study. The taxonomy may be used in further research, for instance, in application system landscape maturity models.

Variability management in Infrastructure as a Service: Scenarios in cloud deployment models

Flexible IT landscapes and efficient management of resources are key issues for enterprises. Variability is an important aspect for flexible IT landscape. The main part of the paper discusses variability characteristics in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). We show what kind of variability is possible at IaaS. In addition, a case study is provided that shows practical examples of infrastructure variability and how these variability issues can be managed using variability solutions and the software configuration tool Puppet. Software configuration tools enable us to treat infrastructure as code and to meet the varying requirements of customers. In the end, we summarize our paper and provide an outlook for future work.

Monitoring Energy Consumption on the Service Level

In this paper, we describe a procedure model for monitoring energy consumption of IT services. The model comprises the steps for identifying and extracting the required data, as well as a mathematic model to predict the energy consumption on both the infrastructure and the service level. Using the example of a distributed and shared ERP system, in which services are represented by ERP transactions, we evaluate the procedure model within a controlled experiment. The model was trained on monitoring data, gathered by performing a benchmark, which triggered more than 1,116,000 dialog steps, initiated by 6000 simulated SAP ERP users. During the benchmark, we monitored the dedicated resource usage for each transaction in terms of CPU time, database request time and database calls as well as the energy consumption of all servers involved in completing the transactions. Our developed procedure model enables IT service providers and business process outsourcers to assign their monitored hardware energy consumption to the actual consuming ERP transactions like creating sales orders, changing outbound deliveries or creating billing documents in watt per hour. The resulting dedicated energy costs can be transferred directly to overlying IT products or to individual organizations that share a multitenant ERP system. The research is mainly relevant for practitioners, especially for internal and external IT service providers. Our results serve as an early contribution to a paradigm shift in the granularity of energy monitoring, which needs to be carried forward to comply with an integrated and product-oriented information management and the ongoing extensive use of cloud- and IT service offerings in business departments.

Variability Management in IaaS

Flexible IT landscapes and efficient management of resources are key issues for enterprises. In cloud computing, varying requirements are discussed at application and platform level. In contrast, variability at cloud infrastructure level is seldom discussed. We have identified several variability requirements at infrastructure level from customer perspective. From service provider perspective, we also highlight which technical means needed to be employed to manage the variability. For elaboration, we provide examples for variability requirements and solutions. We also show with the help of a case study that how we can provide and manage variability using the software configuration tool Puppet. In the end, we summarize our paper and provide an outlook for future work.

Software as a Service Production: An Operationalizable Domain Model

Competition among software as a service (SaaS) providers becomes more pressing as new players enter the market. In order to stand competition providers require more efficient production processes. Therefore, automation is key and standardized domain conceptualizations serve as a basis for automation. Existing conceptualizations of IT service production insufficiently connect the business layer, particularly service level agreements (SLA), with the infrastructure and application layer. Such a connection, however, is necessary to provision the service in accordance with the SLA. In order to close this gap, a SaaS production domain model is constructed. Conceptualizations that were identified in the literature and specific SaaS production requirements informed the construction of this model. The model clearly defines the relationships from the SLA to an operationalizable definition of the service. Hence, it includes definitions of the services infrastructure and application configuration. This means that an information system supporting SaaS production can automatically deploy custom SaaS services that correspond to functional as well as non-functional requirements. Therefore, the composed model contributes twofold. Firstly, it adds to the knowledge base by providing a concise yet comprehensive definition of SaaS productions central entities. Secondly, it can serve as a basis for a data model of a standard business application that supports the production processes of SaaS providers.