Design of an enablement process for on demand applications

In today’s business and economic conditions, enterprise customers are demanding information technology (IT) solutions that are cheaper, less complex, and easier to install. At the same time, independent software vendors (ISVs) are seeing revenue from their core licensed offerings erode because of competition and market saturation. Many believe that the answer to these problems is to offer IT solutions by means of utility computing. Like an electric utility, software applications can be offered as on demand services, and customers pay only for what they use. Creating and implementing such utilities is by no means trivial. It requires some expert help and adherence to established standards and guidelines. In this paper we describe the design of such a process that we call the Application Enablement Program. The process helps ISVs transform their applications into on demand services. This process is structured, repeatable, and globally deployable.