Data Center Hosting Services Governance Portal and Google Map-Based Collaborations

In the IT services business, a multi-year enterprise application hosting contract often carries a price tag that is an order of magnitude larger than that of the solution development. For hosting services providers to compete over the revenue stream, the ability to provide rapid application deployment is a critical consideration on top of the price differences. In fact, a data center is tested repeatedly in its responsiveness, as application hosting requires iterations of deployment adjustments due to business condition, IT optimization, security, and compliance reasons. In this paper, we report an enterprise application deployment governance portal, which coordinates service delivery roles, integrates system management tools, and above all keeps the clients involved or at least informed. In the data center operations such as: early engagement, requirement modeling, solution deployment designs, service delivery, steady state management, and close out; this paper illustrates how the Google Map technology can be used in representing both the target deployment architecture and delivery process. The Google map model can then be used in delivery process execution and collaborations. The resulting governance portal has been fully implemented and is in active use for the data center business transformation in IBM.