A Service Packaging Platform for Delivering Services

For a service to be used in a commercial setting, certain service delivery functions such as monitoring, billing, authentication, etc need to be packaged with the service. Because of the growing number of available services and the diversity in their offerings, predefined service delivery functions like that offered by existing service brokers (e.g. StrikeIron or Salesforce) cannot be easily adapted and plugged in with the core service from a third party provider. The need is to have a lightweight service packaging platform that offers service providers the ability to create reusable service packages by assembling existing service delivery functions or creating new ones. In this paper we introduce the notion of service packages and a pattern-based approach to service packaging. We highlight what is required from a platform to have such service packaging capabilities, and detail a prototype platform that we have developed to meet these requirements.