Patent ID: 7774323

Claim:
An apparatus for managing delivery of an at least one managed service supplied by an at least one server to an at least one remote appliance, the apparatus comprising: a first computing platform executing an at least one delivery platform for delivering the at least one managed service in accordance with a unified delivery policy; a second computing platform executing an at least one server using an at least one first resource related to the at least one managed service, the second computing platform to arrange for the at least one first resource to use a first configuration derived from the unified delivery policy; an at least one remote appliance using an at least one second resource related to the at least one managed service, the remote appliance to arrange for the at least one second resource to use a second configuration derived from the unified delivery policy; and an at least one storage unit for storing the unified delivery policy for the at least one managed service and the first resource or the second resource associated with the at least one managed service, wherein all of deployment, maintenance and monitoring control for the at least one managed service are provided by the delivery platform, in accordance with the unified delivery policy; and wherein the managed service comprises provisioning a business application that requires an executable, and the managed service is supplied by the first resource to the second resource, and wherein the storage unit stores server-appliance pairs of executable components, server-appliance pairs of configurations, and the single unified delivery policy, and no committed persistency associated with managed services is provided at the at least one remote appliance.