Managing an increased service heterogeneity in a converged enterprise infrastructure with SOA

The traditional service management techniques and frameworks are inadequate for handling new-generation integrated applications and cross-enterprise business processes and services. There is a need for management architecture that can provide real-time visibility and control from the application and data levels through the dynamic service and business process levels. The Service Delivery Platform (SDP) is the proper, but still not obvious, choice for such a management architecture. As yet, there is no standard definition for SDP or for its constituent components. In this paper, we identify both the current boundaries of SDP and the concept's importance. We classify and analyse the components and the relations between the elements of this management framework, and visualise the results of our analysis through the reference architecture. Through our representation of the service management framework, we also provide a rational view of the whole service delivery environment.