Leveraging Business Process as a Service with Blueprinting

Willem-Jan van den HeuvelEuropean Research Institute in Service Science (ERISS)

Tilburg UniversityTilburg, The NetherlandsEmail: wjheuvel@uvt.nl

I. INTRODUCTION

In todays global economy, economies of scale are in-creasingly realized through networked enterprises transact-ing and co-creating value on digital infrastructures with aglobal reach. Given this trend, it is expected that the sheercomplexity and scale of enterprise application systems willgrow by orders of magnitude. At the same time there will bean increasing pressure on those systems for flexibility, con-nectivity, dynamicity, elasticity and mobility. Unfortunatelyhowever, while cloud computing is generally heralded asthe enterprise computing paradigm of choice for developingscalable, on-demand applications that may be accessed fromanywhere at any time, it prohibits the development ofprocess-centric enterprise applications systems. In particular,there emerges an urgent need to break the monolithic cloudSoftware-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)and Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) stack architecture in-cluding the difficult-to-customize/connect/extend, one-size-fits-all cloud models underpinning today’s cloud offerings.

II. BUSINESS PROCESS AS A SERVICE

Indeed, the cloud is not just about provisioning servicesthrough the Internet; it also catalyzes a radical transfor-mation towards cloud ecosystems. In sharp contrast totodays monolithic cloud solutions that are constrained bythe capabilities that are made available by the provider attheir delivery level and do not allow for easy extensibilityor customization options, cloud ecosystems will cater forthe tailoring of services to specific business needs using amixture of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS solutions- possibly fromvarious providers.

Cloud ecosystems have been termed Business Process asa Service (BPaaS) reflecting the focus on enterprise specificservices. In particular, BPaaS accommodates creating, mon-itoring and managing unique end-to-end business processesthat are usually syndicated with other external services,possibly provided by diverse SaaS providers. BPaaS mayalso be realized at the level of PaaS, providing a ”horizontal”business operations platforms that encompass industry oper-ating systems offering commoditized, generic yet industry-specific services. Specialized firms can be interconnectedand layered on top of these business operations platforms.

III. BLUEPRINTING

Blueprinting constitutes a novel cloud service engineeringtechnique that blends good/best practices and principles ofService Oriented Computing with Cloud application engi-neering to support service virtualization and independentlayering within a typical cloud stack while achieving a finerlevel of control of cloud services. In particular, blueprintingenables Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) applica-tions to dynamically run on a varied eco-system of cloudvirtualization solutions -some of which may contain fullyintegrated cloud solutions whilst others may be discretecloud service modules or components. The SaaS elementsof a BPaaS solution are abstracted and rendered in a seriesof uniform templates to provide a fast, simplified method forcustomizing, provisioning and automating enterprise cloudservices. Application developers can select blueprints, com-pose, extend and customize them to develop full-featuredprocess-based applications. Composition and customizationof BPaaS applications will be rather quick and easy todevelop. For example, a developer can choose to composeservices from multiple SaaS providers into a coherent andintegrated BPaaS, which s/he can then synthesize withplatform services from one or more PaaS providers, anddeploy on an IaaS cloud.

It is the prime goal of blueprinting to simplify the en-gineering of BPaaS applications by hiding the complexityof their development and deployment. It achieves this byhelping to manage all configuring of middleware and inte-gration with optimal IaaS options. It also realizes portabilityacross clouds and cloud providers to leverage the benefitsof elasticity and scale. Blueprinting supports a flexible top-down continuous closed-feedback loop service refinementand improvement approach. Application-level decisions re-garding virtualized end-to-end services are correlated withand are used to drive resource provisioning and adjust theworkload and traffic to automate the dynamic configurationand deployment of application instances onto available cloudresources.

IV. BIOProf. Dr. W.J.A.M. (Willem-Jan) van den Heuvel is a full

professor of Computer Science at Tilburg University.

2011 IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing

978-0-7695-4535-6/11 $26.00 © 2011 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/CEC.2011.76

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