The developed economy is shifting from being manufacturing based to services based. Different from the traditional manufacturing business, the services business is more complicated and dynamic, and end-user driven rather than product driven. To stay competitive, an enterprise thus has to rethink its business strategies and revamp its operational and organizational structures by taking advantage of its unique engineering expertise and application experience. With the fast industrialization of information technology, services sectors have expanded their territories substantially from traditional commercial transportation, logistics and distribution, health-care delivery, and issuance to financial engineering, e-commerce, e-retailing, e-entertainment (and “e-everything” if possible), supply chains, knowledge transformation and delivery, and services consulting.
Today’s market reality is that the consumer or customer demands more innovative and flexible goods and services with high quality and shorter lead times. For a competitive enterprise, unique and satisfactory services differentiate the enterprise from its competitors; on the other hand, a highly satisfactory services delivery indeed drives more product sales. To meet the needs of the service-led economy, as a matter of fact, enterprises are gradually embracing defining and selling anything as a customer value service for competitive advantage (Rosmarin, 2006).
Significant research and development advancement has been achieved in enterprise computing, integration, and management. The results of this advancement stimulate the creation of a new class of mission-critical infrastructures, a new category of integration methods and software tools, and a new group of business platforms for cost-effectively exploiting, integrating, and managing business operations across enterprises. Enterprise Service Computing: From Concept To Deployment presents the emerging service computing, or service-enabled computing, technologies currently preferably used in integrating enterprise-wide and cross-enterprise applications. The topics covered range from concept development, system design, modeling, and development technologies, to the final deployment, providing both theoretical research results and practical applications.