Assessing Web services quality for call-by-call outsourcing

The process of decision making regarding the outsourcing of various tasks in an enterprise´s value chain involves consideration of a number of important economic trade offs. Outsourcing decisions in the past have typically been of a strategic nature involving long-term commitment. However, given the emerging technologies of Web services and the growing variety of service providers, it seems feasible to utilize the Internet´s ubiquity and pervasiveness for outsourcing at least more simple tasks dynamically in a call-by-call manner. However, to make the required decisions in each instance without having to manually assess the quality of each offer, an automatic quality assessment based on a mutual service level agreement is essential. In this paper, we investigate the necessary mechanisms and demonstrate their feasibility in a real world use case scenario.