Today's call

[Stavros.Isaiadis@uk.fujitsu.com]

Hi all,

first of all, a warning to pay attention to the time differences for the next couple of calls (18th and 25th):

US - New York 12:00
UK - London 16:00
Germany - Munich 17:00
Japan - Tokyo 01:00

Second, in the call today, we'll try to finalize the FAQ and a first version of the educational slidedeck. We'll have a vote for the FAQ since it has been in this format for quite some time.

We'll see if we have some feedback from Dave from the OCCi meeting.

We'll discuss use cases again, especially with mapping to DMTF use cases in mind. This is important if we want to push a possible collaboration further. You can find DMTF use cases in the "Cloud Management Interactions" white paper from the Cloud Incubator group -not sure if it's in public domain though.

We'll have a look at the latest iteration of the Charter wording so please have a look (attached below from Paul's email).

And if I have missed something, feel free to add!

Cheers,

Stavros


Charter Texts
LATEST ITERATION (lets call it v1.2)  

It's hard for different enterprises and domains to work together to in order to understand and respond to their customers needs. SAF provides a collaborative framework that enables diverse enterprises and knowledge domains to address these issues through automation at lower cost and much more effectively. 

SAF is a catalog-based, XML collaborative knowledge framework that is designed to address these challenges by automating appropriate responses to changing business conditions, integrating contributions from diverse domains such as marketing, sales, and IT to provide competitive advantage. Note that SAF uses a medical analogy in order to provide an easy-to-understand conceptual foundation that many people understand, nothing more. The SAF framework has applicability to multiple domains including IT, e.g., Cloud computing, service management, governance, and security as well as business domains, e.g., energy, eGovernment, financial, healthcare, and communications. 

In Cloud computing, the chasm between the business and IT is significantly widened due to the lack of context between cloud-provider and cloud-consumer. The SAF TC considers Cloud computing to be an area where the value of existing and developing standards could be significantly enhanced using SAF. In SAF, both consumer and provider can collaborate in order to bridge the chasm by enabling business-relevant conditions to enable meaningful business-relevant responses. 
 

LAST ITERATION (lets call it v1.1): 

IT and business systems are usually well instrumented to provide a wealth of information about the state of these systems. Human experts in narrow, specific IT infrastructure or business system domains possess substantial knowledge to bring remediate problems or bring them back to their desired state. However, there is a significant challenge leveraging this knowledge across these diverse domains. 

Current approaches are often manual, expensive, inflexible, and error-prone. Failure to meet this challenge creates lost opportunities to develop new and extend existing business, as well as the possible loss of existing business through 'down time' or lower efficiency. There are also significant operational and business-related costs that can affect an entire organization. Cloud computing and other IT initiatives increase the risk and impact of these challenges. 

SAF is a catalog-based, XML knowledge framework that is designed to address these challenges by enabling both problem remediation and optimization of the operational and business characteristics of complex systems. The framework has applicability to both IT domains, e.g., cloud computing, service management, governance, and security as well as non-IT domains, e.g., energy, eGovernment, financial, healthcare, and communications.

 
ORIGINAL FROM THE CHARTER AS IT NOW STANDS (lets call it v1.0): 

IT and business systems are usually well instrumented to provide operators and managers with a wealth of information about the state of each of these systems. Experts in these domains also possess substantial toolboxes of remedial techniques to bring these systems and processes back online or to their desired state. 

However, there often is a significant challenge in the integration, interpretation, and analysis of this diverse state information followed by the ability to act on that information. Failure to meet this challenge impacts the organization through lost opportunities to develop new and extend existing business, as well as the possible loss of existing business through 'down time' or lower efficiency. The continued drain on business and IT resources also impacts the overall operational and business-related costs of the organization. 

The aim of the Symptoms Automation Framework is to integrate information and processes across the organization and/or cloud-enabled services in a more holistic way by defining, enhancing, and maintaining a standard XML-based framework that will enable the collection, detection, isolation, and remediation/optimization of the operational or business characteristics of complex systems with applicability to both IT and non-IT domains including operational and service management, governance, and security.