Information technology has become a key enabler for businesses in a wide variety of sectors (such as banking and health care) and is increasingly used to deliver their services. For these businesses, service excellence is increasingly a competitive differentiator, as customers need to rapidly adapt to changing conditions in the marketplace and create and deploy new services quickly and efficiently. However, service excellence can only be achieved through effective and efficient service management. IBM Service Management is an initiative to help businesses increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their services over the complete life cycle of service creation, deployment, and operations. IBM is bringing together the capabilities of its hardware, software, and consulting services organizations to help customers design, build, deploy, and manage these business services. IBM is also working closely with business partners and industry standards organizations to make this an industry-wide initiative. In this paper, we describe IBM Service Management and its role in improving all aspects of business services.
In a world in which information technology (IT) permeates all aspects of modern life, it becomes increasingly important that IT systems respond promptly to an event or a collection of events. There are many examples of such systems, some of which are studied in detail in this issue of the IBM Systems Journal: command-andcontrol systems for defense applications, massively multiplayer online games, control systems in health care and manufacturing, and business information systems for financial applications such as banking and stock trading. We refer to such systems as responsive systems, a term in which we include real-time and eventbased systems.Because computer networks have been growing larger over time and because the volume of events generated by the distributed applications they host has been increasing at a fast pace, developers have turned to the use of advanced methods for designing and implementing new event-processing applications. These methods, which include improved message-oriented middleware services, service-oriented architectures, and component-based techniques for software development, lower the costs of developing and deploying responsive applications.This issue of the Journal is intended to raise the awareness of the growing demand for responsive systems, and of the resulting challenges for providers of platforms, middleware, and tools. Responsiveness as a principal characteristic of large systems poses unique challenges for modeling, simulating, designing, and implementing such systems. The papers in this issue of the Journal take the reader to the forefront of the research into these areas and offer insight into promising approaches for designing responsive systems.
Dr. Kristof Kloeckner
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