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SUMMARYThis paper represents an economic cost model for cloud computing aiming at comprising all kinds of cost of a commercial environment. To extend conventional state‐of‐the‐art models considering only fixed cost, we developed a concise but comprehensive analytical model, which includes also variable cost allowing for the development and evaluation of business strategies for cloud environments. These strategies can be used for both cloud providers and cloud consumers. The major goal of our model is to comprise all important economic fundamentals and methods. Thus, this new model supports the decision‐making process to be applied with business cases and enables cloud consumers and cloud providers to define their own business strategies and to analyze the respective impact on their business. On the basis of this model, also, the energy efficiency of cloud systems can be evaluated according to chosen business models. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Electronic contracting is key issue for establishing liquid markets dealing with electronic goods. This paper presents a framework for automatic negotiation between Web services. The major goal of the framework is comprising all necessary components for negotiation and re-negotiation. The capabilities and the components are described both for Web service consumer and provider. The re-negotiation framework is based on independent control loops and associated knowledge bases for consumer and provider implementing specific business strategies. An economic cost model considering variable cost and a business rule repository are main parts of the knowledge bases. Furthermore the framework can handle auctioning by using predefined workflows as so called auctioning plug-ins.