SLA Negotiation System Design Based on Business Rules

Abstract

Service level agreements (SLAs) are commonly prepared and signed documents that form the contracts between a service provider and its customers, defining the obligations and liabilities of the parties. SLAs reflect the business needs of both customer and supplier as far as possible. SLAs are usually formed through either the adoption of a boiler plate agreement from the provider, or by negotiation between the parties. With the increasing adoption of software supply being implemented as a network service - software as a service (SaaS) - these methods are rigid or slow and costly. We propose a system that the parties can use to facilitate both fast and flexible agreements through the automation of SLA creation from a combination of service level objectives (SLOs) and business rules. We look at a means for generating these with a SLA-NM (SLA negotiation manager), complying with e-negotiation rules and creates agreements from existing business objectives.