Is Everything-as-a-Service the Step Forward to True Enterprise Service Management?

Technology advances have enabled us to consume services on-demand over the internet instead of traditional on-premises solutions. This has resulted in the widespread adoption of software and infrastructure and platform-as-a-service, across industries. With the appetite for service consumption increasing rapidly, businesses today must recognize the Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) delivery model as an imperative.

In the old static enterprise IT environments, service providers were internal support groups and external service providers. Today’s constantly changing world of on-demand services has ushered new roles in the service supply chain such as service operator, service creator, service broker, service provider, and service integrator. CMDB was the center of the service management universe and businesses revolved around a complex mesh of configurable items. However, the XaaS world revolves around a catalog-driven approach. Here, the service is composed of microservices and each microservice is independent.

Classic enterprise service catalogs are in actuality ‘request item’ catalogs. ­They were mainly formulated for starting a transaction-based service and the fulfilment of a specific item for the requestor. The XaaS delivery model is based on the what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach. This means the offerings are cataloged for seamless production and consumption. The ‘as a service” era service catalog incorporates orchestration for fulfilment as an integral element.

This system publishes the consumption component, and the integrated orchestration model is used for seamless outcome fulfilment and delivery – the entire process being visible in the catalog.

In an era of service proliferation, the demand for service cannot be ful­filled by a single service provider. Thus the market is wide open for multiple service providers who focus on niche services.

With the explosion of service providers, it is not viable to build and publish the service catalog from scratch, thus catalog aggregation is the only option.

However, companies need to strategize XaaS more from a business-benefit perspective, with a delivery model which empowers both businesses and their consumers. The advent of new-age retail business models provides enterprises across industries with the right framework to revolutionize their service delivery and management. From a supplier perspective, anything as a service offers greater scalability, better service quality, and flexible pricing, adding definitive business value to the enterprise.

The size of the provider is of little relevance in this model. Everything from micro services to megaservices

can coexist in the same catalog. Similarly, the billing revenue can range from a few dollars to a thousands of dollars. This offers greater flexibility to consumers as they can subscribe to only those services that they need, start, and stop their subscription to the service as per choice. Above all, they are not required to take the headache of procuring and maintaining products.

Additionally, being cloud-based, it eliminates the need for massive capital expenditures for enterprises. The deployment architecture of cloud-based offerings provides for quick turnaround and high scalability. This helps the enterprise to thrive on a growing number of consumers through the economy of scale by offering them an ever-increasing number of services. As multitenancy is a core tenet of cloud computing, service providers also gain by using the same platform to produce and deliver their services to multiple consumers. Also, by design, the services are device-agnostic and can be consumed anywhere in the world, offering consumers greater flexibility.

We, at DRYiCE, have incorporated the concepts of XaaS in our product DRYiCE SX. SX natively supports the aggregation of diversified services from different sources and can publish all kinds of enterprise services in a unified catalog. It allows enterprises to offer their consumers a single system of engagement to access the enterprise services. It also allows the CIO to orchestrate and source the services from different providers rather than in-house creation.