The Pervasive Nature of Variability in SOC

Service-oriented computing has gained attention from researchers and industry due to various benefits. Enterprises are supported by SOC-based solutions. Enterprise requirements change with the customer needs, market conditions, and variability is often needed in SOC. Research usually focuses at variability on the business process level and ignores variability at other layers. In this paper, we show what kind of variability can occur and how it spans across all layers of SOC. We present some example scenarios to discuss different kinds of variability and their reasons in SOC environments. Finally, we classify variability to show that variability is not an isolated problem in a single layer.