E-BUSINESS ON DEMAND OPERATING ENVIRONMENT A new e-business on demand operational environment is needed. To gain all the advantages of e-business on demand will require customers to move away from the complicated, difficult to manage, and extremely costly IT infrastructures of today to the new dynamic e-business on demand model. The e-business on demand-operating environment has four essential attributes. -
It must be integrated Corporations have been more successful and more profitable by creating internal and external integration. This allows access to large amounts of valuable data, files, systems, and reports, sharing custom applications where applicable and needed. Integrating outside suppliers, partners, and customers allows for a holistic but very tight integration. After doing so, you will have an integrated universe where everyone with an interest stands to benefit. You can network in real time, keeping on top of events as they happen, achieving accuracy and integrity while managing risk at the beginning of a fully operational e-business on demand model. -
It must be based on open standards Open standards are one of the most significant movements in the IT industry in the last 50 years. Open standards make IT work at its best. The opening of standards continues with the adoption of Java, XML, Linux, and others. These standards are critical to making e-business on demand work successfully. When multiple partners, suppliers, and customers come together, they will have a mix of systems and applications. E-business on demand will allow them to share and integrate data and systems, working in the same environment. Open standards will make e-business on demand work. -
It is must be virtualized Customers will always use the solution that fits best with their own objectives and benefits them most. E-business on demand is a utility computing approach. It can be served up when needed, whether internally or across secure Internet connections. Other technologies, such as grid computing, can allow for the introduction of huge computing resources—not one computer, but thousands creating one very large virtual computer. It is expected that the grid solution will be adopted by large corporations and become known as "intragrids." So when that huge spike in orders or traffic on the Web site is detected, computing resources can be made available immediately to solve this problem. Computing will become a utility that will be traded, bought, and sold as needed like other commodities, such as pigs, soya beans, rubber, spices, timber, coffee, and palm oil. Like traditional utilities, such as telephone and electricity, Web services will be metered, and customers will pay for their use of what will be called by the new term eUtility. The terms of use (called service level agreements or SLAs) of eUtilities will include functionality, availability, performance, resources, and reliability. These terms of use may vary from customer to customer, and they may change over time. The big payback for corporations will be when they can purchase only the computing commodities they want at future prices, for delivery only when needed. Again, the savings will be gigantic. E-business on demand will create a new breed of IT vendor and related services to go with it. A corporation using e-business on demand will have lots of choices as to what to do and who to buy from. -
It must be Autonomic In the e-business on demand world, there is no place for managing complexity. That will be the domain of software and systems. With the large numbers of open systems and the tight integration required, the virtual world will need the automation provided by autonomic computing. Balancing workloads, managing automated service level agreements (SLAs), reallocating adequate system resources, and so on cannot and should not be done manually by IT staff. Eventually autonomic computing will manage e-business on demand itself with minimal human intervention. E-business on demand cannot properly function without autonomic computing. For a summary, review Figure 7.2. Figure 7.2. The e-business on demand operating environment will grow from the building blocks of integration, automation, and virtualization. 
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