Conceptual Framework for a Comprehensive Service Management Middleware

Web services have greatly leveraged the world of Business-to-Business (B2B) communication and promise a lot more through dynamic service composition. In order to compose Web services into a business process, it is necessary to find suitable services, negotiate and establish Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service providers, build a workflow with the selected services and finally execute the workflow while monitoring the performance of the services to verify that the SLAs are satisfied. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for a Comprehensive Service Management Middleware (CSMM) to leverage the usability of Web services in business processes. CSMM has a distributed and modular architecture suitable for the distributed nature of Web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in general. The novel approach of architecting the middleware based on Web service technology can leverage outsourcing of management responsibilities, and thereby, make the most cost effective use of Web services.