Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the enterprise allows for structural reduction in the cost of both deployment and operations of Information Technology (IT) systems in spite of increasing complexity. This complexity is often dictated by regulatory mandates such as Sarbanes Oxley (also known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002) and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, 1996), and by the increasing integration of global, distributed, and perhaps outsourced resources, factors that can't be controlled by the CIO (Chief Information Officer) or the enterprise. Costs are minimized during provisioning by designing subsystems as services with an eye toward maximizing reuse and interoperability.

In an SOA environment, IT infrastructure can be made to behave operationally in ways similar to a self-adjusting organism: it is essentially regulated by business-defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and it can correct itself dynamically in an autonomic fashion whenever deviations from the SLA occur.

These provisioning and operations capabilities in turn require advanced infrastructure orchestration and management features around the hardware. The capabilities are attained by applying service orientation to the concepts of orchestration and management themselves under the umbrella of Service-Oriented Infrastructure (SOI). SOI extends service orientation from the enterprise as a whole down to bare-metal provisioning, when a computer system does not have software of any sort loaded. Using this paradigm, we can architect hardware to become an integral part of a service infrastructure, and hence we can talk about a hardware platform-as-a-service (PaaS) under which Intel platforms directly interact with service-oriented components in the IT infrastructure. A first implementation of such a concept is Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT), which provides direct platform management services independent of the OS.

In this paper, we first discuss the different aspects of the SOI concept and illustrate how Intel® AMT could be applied in this context. In addition, we describe a Proof of Concept (PoC) conducted by Intel IT to further demonstrate the use of Web-Services (WS-*) technologies for enterprise manageability based on Intel® AMT.

It might seem that service orientation is applicable only to large enterprises with the critical mass to provide the reuse opportunities to justify a service-oriented design. This is correct under what we call the "inside-out" SOA paradigm that assumes an internal SOA effort serving the enterprise around it. We envision an "outside-in" paradigm applicable to the small and medium business (SMB) space and to emerging markets where the organization being served is actually a whole ecosystem, potentially larger than almost any enterprise. PaaS would facilitate the provisioning and orchestration of services by independent service providers, in addition to IT organization. It is possible to envision a rich ecosystem where turnkey services are delivered through multiple levels of aggregation by collaborating service providers.

PaaS stems from the markets adoption of the term Software as a Service (SaaS) with its exposing traditional applications as web services-based interfaces. PaaS is the concept of exposing platform information and capabilities thru APIs (services). In the Web2.0 marketplace APIs based on standards-based interfaces are being used by a new generation of developers to assemble new solutions quickly. While most of the discussion around services has been around solutions "in the network," the premise applies equally to services exposed by computing devices. APIs from simple Java Script calls for PHP coders to full-blown web service calls for application developers that provide information about the nature or state of platforms are what we are collectively calling PaaS. [10]