Currently, most research in services focuses on the needs of the service provider. Examples include research to efficiently create, operate, and deliver services. Much less attention is paid to what the service customer needs to do in order to procure, integrate, or consume a service within the context of a service supply chain. In this paper, we introduce a Services Business Operating Environment (SBOE) to support services from the perspective of the service consumer. An SBOE provides capabilities for defining, contracting, integrating and operating service supply chains as viewed from the perspective of an enterprise customer. The SBOE acts like an operating system within which the customer can connect, combine and transform services purchased from others into higher level abstractions that are relevant for business. We anticipate such an environment to be critical to the "future of IT," where business and IT services are procured over the cloud from specialized service providers rather than created in-house as is done traditionally. We describe research at HPLabs that identifies the requirements and challenges posed by an SBOE, and present an initial prototype around IT supplier management that we have used to explore some of the concepts.
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