The Role of Value Facilitation Regarding Cloud Service Provider Profitability in the Cloud Ecosystem

Herzfeldt, Alexander; Floerecke, Sebastian; Ertl, Christoph; Krcmar, Helmut

doi:10.4018/978-1-5225-5951-1.ch006

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Another research strand aims to explore the individual aspects within cloud business models, which may have a positive influence on the growth of the general adoption level of cloud services compared to the on-premise IT among customers (e.g., [50,51]). A literature study of Labes et al [52] shows that several further contributions have dealt with one specific or a small number of business model components, such as the revenue [53] or the resource model [54], whereas a holistic approach remains an exception. An isolated investigation, however, contradicts the logic of business models as the components are interrelated and interdependent [31,36].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Success-Driving Business Model Characteristics of Iaas and Paas Providers

Floerecke

Lehner²

2018

IJCCSA

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Market analyses show that some cloud providers are significantly more successful than others. The research on the success-driving business model characteristics of cloud providers and thus, the reasons for this performance discrepancy is, however, still limited. Whereas cloud business models have mostly been examined comprehensively, independently from the distinctly different cloud ecosystem roles, this paper takes a perspective shift from an overall towards a selective, role-specific and thereby ecosystemic perspective on cloud business models. The goal of this paper is specifically to identify the success-driving business model characteristics of the so far widely neglected cloud ecosystem's core roles, IaaS and PaaS provider, by conducting an exploratory multiple-case study. 21 expert interviews with representatives from 17 cloud providers serve as central data collection instrument. The result is a catalogue of generic as well as cloud-specific, subdivided into role-overarching and role-specific, business model characteristics. This catalogue supports cloud providers in the initial design, comparison and revision of their business models. Researchers obtain a promising starting and reference point for future analysis of business models of various cloud ecosystem roles. KEYWORDSInfrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Success-Driving Business Model Characteristics, Cloud Computing Ecosystem, Exploratory Multiple-Case Study.The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section two contains the related work regarding cloud computing, business models, business ecosystems and success factors. In the third section, the conducted case study research approach is depicted in detail. The identified success-driving business model characteristics are listed and described separately according to the various business model components in section four. In section five, the results are discussed and several unexpected aspects concerning the current situation and possible future developments within the cloud ecosystem are presented. Section six provides a summary, limitations, contributions for theory and practice and a prospect on future research. RELATED WORKCloud computing is a relatively new IT operations model, which has radically transformed the way IT resources are produced, provided and used [21]. This is the reason why numerous scholars (e.g., [10,22]) consider cloud computing as a co-evolution of computing technology and business models. The main characteristics of cloud services, including on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service, distinguish it from its traditional counterpart, the on-premise IT [23]. Cloud services can be delivered via four different deployment models: public, private, hybrid and community. These deployment models particularly differ in their degree of operational isolation, the access control to a specific cloud service and the physical location of the underlying hardware servers [24].

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Success-Driving Business Model Characteristics of Iaas and Paas Providers

Floerecke

Lehner²

2018

IJCCSA

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“…However, the main goal of our work, beyond the study of pricing schemes, is to analyze and increase the profitability of the cloud service provider while maintaining a balance between the cost of the infrastructure and the user's demands. Herzfeldt et al (2018) discuss different guidelines for the profitable design of cloud services. They carried out 14 interviews with cloud service provider experts, in which they addressed the relationship between value facilitation, that is, the capability to accumulate resources for future customer demands, and profitability for the cloud service provider.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Profiling SLAs for cloud system infrastructures and user interactions

Cambronero

Bernal

Valero

et al. 2021

PeerJ Computer Science

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Cloud computing has emerged as a cutting-edge technology which is widely used by both private and public institutions, since it eliminates the capital expense of buying, maintaining, and setting up both hardware and software. Clients pay for the services they use, under the so-called Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which are the contracts that establish the terms and costs of the services. In this paper, we propose the CloudCost UML profile, which allows the modeling of cloud architectures and the users’ behavior when they interact with the cloud to request resources. We then investigate how to increase the profits of cloud infrastructures by using price schemes. For this purpose, we distinguish between two types of users in the SLAs: regular and high-priority users. Regular users do not require a continuous service, so they can wait to be attended to. In contrast, high-priority users require a constant and immediate service, so they pay a greater price for their services. In addition, a computer-aided design tool, called MSCC (Modeling SLAs Cost Cloud), has been implemented to support the CloudCost profile, which enables the creation of specific cloud scenarios, as well as their edition and validation. Finally, we present a complete case study to illustrate the applicability of the CloudCost profile, thus making it possible to draw conclusions about how to increase the profits of the cloud infrastructures studied by adjusting the different cloud parameters and the resource configuration.

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“…According to a recent literature review by Senyo et al (2018), the most frequently addressed business issues in cloud research are adoption, cost, trust and privacy, legislation and ethics. Dealing with (parts of) business models and the business ecosystem have also been becoming more popular over the last years (Floerecke and Lehner 2018b;Herzfeldt et al 2018).…”

Section: Cloud Computing Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The cloud ecosystem has been continuously expanding with regard to the number of organizations, roles and service linkages, and has become increasingly complex and intransparent (Floerecke and Lehner 2015;Herzfeldt et al 2018;Karunagaran et al 2016). This missing transparency is considered as one of the main reasons why the world-wide adoption rate of cloud services has failed to meet the high expectations so far (Appelrath et al 2014;Hentschel and Leyh 2016;Sunyaev and Schneider 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, the PaCE model has not yet been examined concerning its structural equivalence and completeness according to the real cloud business. Apart from this, the cloud ecosystem may have undergone structural and compositional changes since then due to market dynamics (Herzfeldt et al 2018;Karunagaran et al 2016). In addition to that, existing cloud ecosystem models lack a proof of their contribution to theory and practice (Floerecke and Lehner 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cloud computing ecosystem model: evaluation and role clusters

2020

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Several significantly different attempts have been undertaken to visualize the complex and opaque cloud computing ecosystem by a descriptive model. Recently, scholars have developed a new role-based cloud ecosystem model (Passau Cloud Computing Ecosystem Model (PaCE model)) based on a systematic analysis and synthesis of the previous models. However, its scientific evaluation is still outstanding. The main goal is therefore to conduct an evaluation regarding its structural equivalence and completeness compared to the real cloud business according to the design science research paradigm. The second goal is to demonstrate the model’s usefulness by using it as an instrument for the identification of role clusters, which are frequently covered by organizations. To this end, a cross-sectional analysis is conducted, in which 758 organizations are manually analysed and matched with the model’s current roles. As a result, roles have been newly added, removed, broken down into sub-roles, abstracted to a meta-role and renamed. The cluster analysis unveiled five role clusters. Whereas some roles were predominantly found as single role, further roles were exclusively or very frequently found in combination with others. Overall, the revised model creates, compared to the common rather technically orientated market overviews by market research institutes, a detailed categorization schema helping to understand and investigate the organizations belonging to the cloud ecosystem.

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The Role of Value Facilitation Regarding Cloud Service Provider Profitability in the Cloud Ecosystem

Cited by 11 publications

References 41 publications

Success-Driving Business Model Characteristics of Iaas and Paas Providers

Success-Driving Business Model Characteristics of Iaas and Paas Providers

Profiling SLAs for cloud system infrastructures and user interactions

Cloud computing ecosystem model: evaluation and role clusters

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