| Abstract |
Nowadays, when a customer is looking for a service bundle such as a
spam-free e-mail box (which consists of more elementary services like mail
storage and a spam filter) he is left with little options. Either he
chooses a readily precomposed service bundle offered by a single
commercial provider or he builds the bundle himself out of the services
offered by various providers. The first solution may be suboptimal for the
customer and not fulfill his needs completely. The latter may be out of
reach of an average Internet user. We can envision a third way, namely the
automated creation of bundles out of basic commercial services provided by
various parties. To realize this solution a middleware between customers
and service providers is needed to facilitate discovery, negotiation,
provisioning and monitoring of service bundles. During my talk I would
like to focus on the requirements imposed on such a middleware that stem
from the business nature of commercial services and I will describe
shortly the technical problems originating from these requirements. |