Service offerings, requestable service offerings, and service level targets

ITILv3 describes a service as a combination of utility and warranty whereas:

• Utility describes what a service does. 
• Warranty defines the promise or guarantee that a product or service will meet its agreed requirements.
  Warranty is composed of a set of assertions by the service provider about the service levels that are provided.
  The service levels include the type and hours of support, availability targets, response times, and storage capacity.

Service providers offer the same utility at different levels of warranty. One customer may get the utility with 5x8 telephone support while another customer may do so with 7x24 telephone support. Requiring the creation of a new service to capture the variations in warranty would lead to a proliferation of services and confusion at several levels. 

Each dimension of warranty, such as response times or availability is represented as a Service Level Target (SLT). Some SLTs (representing the warranty) are connected to a service (representing the utility) to form a Service Offering (SO), represented by BMC_Offering. Therefore, a SO represents a level of warranty for a given service represented by BMC_BusinessService. There can be several service offerings for a given service where each SO represents a different warranty. 

For example, a business service offering may have an SLT that requires IT Support to deliver the service to customers in no more than two hours. This service offering may be named ERP Gold, based on a service called ERP defined in the service catalog. Business customers do not subscribe to services, they subscribe to service offerings.

BMC_Offering is an abstract class. To create instances in CMDB, the BMC_ServiceOffering class is used to represent an ERP Gold service offering. A Requestable Offering (RO) is the part of a service that end users can see and request. Like a service offering, it combines a service (utility) and a service level target (warranty). For example, for an ERP System business service offering, you might have requestable offerings for creating an account on the ERP System, closing an account on the ERP System, and increasing the database limit on the ERP System. A requestable offering is represented by BMC_RequestableOffering.

There are two types of Requestable Offerings (ROs):

• Delivery ROs — Sets up the service (creates a service offering instance) such as creating an account on ERP.
• Transactional ROs — Could be request such as reset my password or close an account on ERP.

A service offering can have one or more delivery requestable offerings and one or more transactional requestable offerings.