Exploring Cloud Service Brokering from an Interface Perspective

Service brokering has an increasingly prominent role in bridging the gap between business requirement and technology enablement. We propose the concept of service value brokering (SVB) to fulfil the possible missing linkages between business and technology layer. In this paper, we modeled a SVB Web service as an integration of two layers with the business interface (BIF) and the technical interface (TIF). With this distinction, Web service compositions can map to two layers of compositions at both BIF and TIF levels. We notice that any partial consideration on the consistency of either BIF or TIF layers would likely leave mismatching situations on the other layer. We employ SVB to solve these mismatching situations. With the help of SVB, we address the needs of coherent business planning and IT implementation in a model drivenmanner. Finally, we illustrate the feasibility of our approach in the development of a modern cloud-based tourism e-commerce platform.