Workshop scope, focus:
As Cloud-based distributed computing infrastructures evolve to become the standard environment for providing and consuming services in academic and commercial domains, mechanisms are needed to agree on the objectives and the quality of service provision. This could be facilitated by means of electronic contracts between service consumers and one or more service provider(s), in order to achieve the necessary reliability and commitment on both sides. Such contracts help to establish a well-defined relationship between a service provider and a client in the context of a particular service provision. This is especially important if the services or resources to be used come from different administrative domains and if commercial service provision needs to be supported. Over the last years we have seen dynamic, electronic Service Level Agreements (SLAs) increasingly being used in distributed computing infrastructures to establish these kinds of guarantees and relationships. In Cloud Computing, as of today, most often paper SLA contracts or simple contracts provided through the web-pages of Cloud providers are used. However, all stakeholders have a strong interest to have more elaborated technologies for electronic contracting in place covering the whole service lifecycle and integrating with existing IT service management solutions. Moreover, it will become essential, also for academic data centers, to understand the implications of such contracts on system operation and tasks like incident or change management. This workshop will provide a forum to present current research and up-to-date solutions from research and business communities to discuss questions around IT service management in Clouds and distributed systems in general.

Papers describing original research on both theoretical and practical aspects of ITSM workshop 2012 are solicited.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

IT service management for federated Clouds
Service overflow into Cloud – implications on service management
Management of service orchestrations spanning multiple administrative domains
Non-technical aspects of IT service management like legal regulations or trust
Governance, risk and compliance related issues
Managing user expectations using electronic contracts
Machine readable contracts, automation
Business models & Cloud economy
Application of best practices and standards in Cloud infrastructures – ITIL, ISO/IEC 20000, et al.
Application areas benefiting from electronic contracts
Languages to express SLAs (e.g. SLOs, BLOs, QoS, Guarantees, Penalties)
Management of the SLA lifecycle including negotiation, observation and assessment
Comparison and matchmaking of SLA and policy descriptions
SLA negotiation strategies
Multi-party contracts and SLA chaining
SLA-based trust management including virtual organization management
Digital signatures, trusted infrastructures