Economic analysis on the financial benefits and risks is crucial for deciding whether an IT transformation should take place. While the financial analysis techniques for general investment is well known, and there have been case studies for many IT types of IT transformations, there is no good methodology that an IT professional can follow and readily conduct return on investment or total cost analysis. This paper aims to fill this void and proposes an economic analysis methodology that is applicable to all IT transformations.

Effective management of Web Services systems relies on accurate understanding of end-to-end transaction flows, which may change over time as the service composition evolves. This work takes a data mining approach to automatically recovering end-to-end transaction flows from (potentially obscure) monitoring events produced by monitoring tools. We classify the caller-callee relationships among monitoring events into three categories(identity, direct-invoke, and cascaded-invoke), and propose unsupervised learning algorithms to generate rules for each type of relationship. The key idea is to leverage the temporal information available in the monitoring data and extract patterns that have statistical significance. By piecing together the caller-callee relationships a teach step along the invocation path, we can recover the end-to-end flow for every executed transaction. Experiments demonstrate that our algorithms outperform human experts in terms of solution quality, scale well with the data size, and are robust against noises in monitoring data.

A service level agreement (SLA) is a service contract that includes the evaluation criteria for agreed service quality standards. Since agreeable specifications on the evaluation criteria cannot be limited in practice, competitive SLA management products must be extensible in terms of their support for contract-specific SLA compliance evaluations. While the need of running and managing those software products as services increases, we have found that developing a good solution for configuring them as per contractual terms is a challenging task. This paper presents the Fresco framework, which facilitates configuring extensible SLA management systems using Web services. An XML-based specification of SLA management related data called SCOL will also be presented to show how the framework supports contract-specific SLA terms and contract-specific extensions of the deployed SLA management software. The paper furthermore shows how the Fresco system uses a template-based approach to communicate with other Web services applications with support for various input and output formats. Our experience with implementing the Fresco framework for a leading commercial SLA management software product demonstrates that the framework facilitates the creation of effective and efficient solutions for configuring extensible SLA management systems.

The routing tables of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) can vary from size O(1) to O(n). Currently, what is lacking is an analytic framework to suggest the optimal routing table size for a given workload. This paper (1) compares DHTs with O(1) to O(n) routing tables and identifies some good design points; and (2) proposes protocols to realize the potential of those good design points.We use total traffic as the uniform metric to compare heterogeneous DHTs and emphasize the balance between maintenance cost and lookup cost. Assuming a node on average processes 1,000 or more lookups during its entire lifetime, our analysis shows that large routing tables actually lead to both low traffic and low lookup hops. These good design points translate into one-hop routing for systems of medium size and two-hop routing for large systems.Existing one-hop or two-hop protocols are based on a hierarchy. We instead demonstrate that it is possible to achieve completely decentralized one-hop or two-hop routing, i.e., without giving up being peer-to-peer. We propose 1h-Calot for one-hop routing and 2h-Calot for two-hop routing. Assuming a moderate lookup rate, compared with DHTs that use O(log n) routing tables, 1h-Calot and 2h-Calot save traffic by up to 70% while resolving lookups in one or two hops as opposed to O(log n) hops.

XML has become one of the core technologies for contemporary business applications, especially web-based applications. To facilitate processing of diverse XML data, we propose an extensible, integrated XML processing architecture, the XML Virtual Machine (XVM), which connects XML data with their behaviors. At the same time, the XVM is also a framework for developing and deploying XML-based applications. Using component-based techniques, the XVM supports arbitrary granularity and provides a high degree of modularity and reusability. XVM components are dynamically loaded and composed during XML data processing. Using the XVM, both client-side and server-side XML applications can be developed and deployed in an integrated way. We also present an XML application container built on top of the XVM along with several sample applications to demonstrate the applicability of the XVM framework.

A composite multimedia presentation may be represented by a sequence of virtual media data packets. An algorithm is presented for ordering these virtual media data packets so as to minimize the initial delay required to transfer the composite stream from a media server to a client. This algorithm has been implemented as part of the IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4.