Management of IT services

The significant increase in the complexity of enterprise applications and the customer demand for distributed information technology (IT) services has led to a change in the way systems are managed. The focus has moved from deviceoriented to customerand service-oriented management. Device-oriented management remains important as it is an essential requirement for efficient IT service management. However deviceoriented management is exclusively in the domain of the provider and is driven by the objectives of the provider. On the other hand, what has become essential today is the management of the underlying infrastructure with respect to the services offered to customers and the agreed upon service level agreements. There has been a paradigm shift to IT service management; with this shift we need to deal with new and challenging management issues. Among the challenges of service-oriented management is the accounting, charging and billing of the offered services. The first paper entitled The Cumulus Pricing Model as an Adaptive Framework for Feasible, Efficient, and User-friendly Tariffing of Internet Services by Peter Reichel, David Hausheer and Burkhard Stiller addresses the aspect of charging for quality of service (QoS)-enabled Internet services. The authors propose the use of the Cumulus Pricing Scheme (CPS) as a framework for pricing Internet services by showing that the CPS allows a well-balanced compromise between economic viability and technical feasibility. Another challenge of IT service management is service provisioning. Service providers compete for customers by offering high quality services, the