Thorsten Hau

Where to Start with SOA: Criteria for Selecting SOA Projects

The concept of service oriented architectures has received considerable attention lately. Despite the hype our experience from five major German chemicals companies shows that firms do not blindly adopt the concept but want to see its value for their organizations. This paper identifies criteria for projects that should serve especially well as first proof of concept SOA implementations. Therefore the paper compares project goals to SOA benefits and requirements and deduces decision supporting criteria. Complex projects with many involved stakeholders and high risk of changing requirements, to name a few of the criteria, are more likely to profit from SOA than small simple projects with few involved people. The criteria are then applied in five cases to evaluate projects the authors analyzed. The application shows that the criteria give a good indication for or against SOA adoption in a project.

Carrier activities in the CDN market - An exploratory analysis and strategic implications

The commercial structure of the Internet is changing. Content delivery networks (CDN) are becoming potent players in the bandwidth market and are responsible for an ever growing fraction of total Internet traffic. Carriers on the other hand are looking for strategies to escape the “dumb pipe” scenario and are increasingly seeing added value services as a way out. Several Tier-1 carriers are expanding their business models into content delivery which appears as a natural extension of their core business in an upstream direction. In this paper, the trend is discussed based on case examples. Resource based view is applied to provide economic reasoning.

Design Rules for User-Oriented IT Service Descriptions

Customers of complex IT-services increasingly demand integrated value bundles that fit their individual needs. At the same time, IT service providers are facing commoditization of their products and need to standardize their portfolios to realize economies of scale. While approaches to coping with the gap between individual customer demand and the economic necessity of standardization have a long standing tradition in mature manufacturing industries, IT-service providers still struggle with translating their standardized portfolio into a form that is understandable and relevant for their customers. This paper proposes a way of describing IT-services that follows the paradigm of a “service dominant logic”. We therefore transfer “service dominant logic” to the realm of IT and propose guidelines to create customer oriented service descriptions. An excerpt of a prototype description serves as an example, how the technical, inside view on IT-services can be translated into a customer-oriented outside view.