Designing standard service offerings for reducing IT service management cost

A significant portion of a typical Enterprise IT services budget is spent on steady state management operations known as ”operational expenses”. Recently ”Standard Services Offerings” based approaches are proposed to reduce such cost where only a few set of versions and configurations are used to build an Enterprise IT services platform. A key challenge in these approaches is the choice of appropriate base set of configurations that can be used as seed configurations. Our paper addresses the above problem by studying several methods towards choosing the right set of application stack with configurations that minimizes the cost of building the target services environment from this seed set of offerings. We present four different methods and use model driven simulation studies to compare the performance of these approaches. We validate our key findings by analyzing our approaches for a large Enterprise customer IT environment.