PaaS platforms provide a number of interfaces for software and hardware functions, and applications for them will be developed not from scratch but from combining these verified functions. The interfaces allow various design choices to meet requirements, and also raise complexity in the application production and management. To increase both clients' satisfaction and providers' productivity, this paper proposes application lifecycle kit, which embraces both design and operation. The kit stylizes applications' design models, prototype and resource conventions for runtime, and it can be used as a baseline for new service development and operation, enabling instant production and mass customization.

Practices of developing applications based on SOA principles need to be renovated to meet new requirements for large-scale data processing and to adapt advancements in IT infrastructures in cloud computing. Resource planners will have a significant role as they bridge the development and operation phases in application development. To accomplish these tasks, this paper presents architecture design methods, which reinforce designing and assessing architecture with an applied Design Structure Matrix (DSM). This approach can embrace development of both business logics of applications and IT resources to run them in the cloud and the methods are established through consulting practices on a datacenter.

This paper proposes a framework, which integrates the development and operation environments for cloud applications. Adopting perspectives on lifecycle management, the framework is equipped with tools and platforms, which seamlessly integrate lifetime phases: requirement analysis, architecture design, application implementation, operation and improvement. These are predicated on theories in design engineering, enabling identification of constraints arising in the development process and of dependencies among functional modules. A case study shows the feasibilities of the design principles, and indicates possibilities for the framework to be an Application Platform as a Service (APaaS), which can form an ecosystem of datacenter operators, systems integrators and application providers.

The IT industry traditionally offers system services to user companies. The services which integrate software and hardware products are geared toward product-based business models. However, with the emergence of cloud computing, users' in-house systems and applications are virtualized on the net, and are replaced with ones provided through outsourcing services. The alternative systems will be combinations of service functions of their companies' and of outsourcers'. This will relieve user companies from their legacy systems, allowing them to concentrate on their competence and to develop new business models effectively. In order to meet this trend, IT vendors should focus not only on the values of platform development but also on those of creating business opportunities. They need to share users' business goals and collaborate with them to enhance their business values. This paper proposes a framework and supporting tools to co-create business values between IT vendors and clients through the business lifecycle, showing the results from partly applying them to the early stages of development of e-learning services.

Recently, designers have been required solving comprehensive problem becoming greater and more complicated. In relation to this background, we have proposed Universal Abduction Studio (UAS); a computer environment that synthetically supports creative design. However, it is difficult for a designer to manually acquire multiple domain knowledge required for UAS. Therefore, we propose a Web-based knowledge database construction method for supporting design by UAS in this paper.