A platform providing bidirectional service integration for the dynamic long-tail service market

Nowadays technologies, frameworks and architectures are forced to be service driven, platform independent, reliable and scalable. Application markets, Service Oriented Architectures and Cloud Computing are currently in focus of the new upcoming business models. Based on an analysis of service life cycle management and composition standards the following article illustrates an architecture for a service platform. This component provides both the export of internal software components as services (inside-out approach) as well as a flexible service life cycle management by considering the needs of Platform as a Service (Paas )and Software as a Service (SaaS). Furthermore, the platform is able to import external services in order to enlarge the service portfolio (outside-in approach) or even to compose the services to create new mash-up services. This leads to collaboration and resource federation between service providers whereas the service access is organized and protected by a policy-based service management function.