The ICorpMaker: A Dynamic Framework for Application-Service Providers

Application Service Providers (ASP) simultaneously host the commercial activities of many clients. The expectation is that the number of clients that a large ASP will support will increase by several orders of magnitude as the market for service hosting expands. Being able to automate the process of adding new clients and dynamically modifying the resource allocation of existing ones has obvious advantages. However, before this can be achieved a set of significant technical problems needs to be addressed in relation to the dynamic resource allocation across the ASP’s infrastructure. In such a demanding environment ASPs cannot know the nature and constraints of all their clients’ commercial activities. On the other-hand, clients should not be expected to know much about the infrastructure upon which their activity is being hosted.
A framework--the ICorpMaker--is described which allows much of the intelligence for resource allocation within an ASP’s infrastructure to be delegated to the clients themselves, without requiring clients to know precise details about that infrastructure. This allows client control software to increase or decrease a client’s current resource allocation in response to client specific information.