Differentiating Commoditized Services in a Services Marketplace

In a services marketplace where a service is provided by multiple service providers, service offerings have to be differentiated against competitor services. Differentiation helps to sustain as well as grow market share. Strategies to differentiate service offerings have to be unintrusive - without requiring major changes to the existing service realization mechanisms. In this paper, we present a strategy for service providers to differentiate their commoditized services. We show how to identify and document differentiating aspects of a service. By unintrusively manipulating these differentiation aspects we can differentiate services from that of competition. We specify these differentiating aspects as service policies using the WS-Policy framework.