Challenges for the comprehensive management of cloud services in a PaaS framework

The 4CaaSt project aims at developing a PaaS framework that enables flexible definition, marketing, deployment and management of Cloud-based services and applications. The major innovations proposed by 4CaaSt are the blueprint and its lifecycle management, a one stop shop for Cloud services and a PaaS level resource management featuring elasticity. 4CaaSt also provides a portfolio of ready to use Cloud native services and Cloud-aware immigrant technologies

Capturing multi-stakeholder needs in Customer-Centric Cloud Service Design

Cloud computing applications and services go hand in hand, yet there is no clear mechanism for ensuring that the cloud applications are designed from a customer’s perspective. Likewise services can require adaptation for multiple customers of stakeholders, which require differing user experience outcomes. This paper describes the initial design and development of a predictive analytics cloud service application, which uses historic customer data to predict the existing customers that are most likely to churn. Service blueprinting, a service innovation method, was used as the underlying design model for developing an initial shared understanding of the required service. Personas were used in the requirements analysis to develop insights into multi-stakeholder needs. Using the design science paradigm an extended cloud service design theory is proposed, as an outcome of the ongoing development of this analytics platform

4CaaSt: Comprehensive management of Cloud services through a PaaS

The 4CaaSt project aims at developing a PaaS framework that enables flexible definition, marketing, deployment and management of Cloud-based services and applications. The major innovations proposed by 4CaaSt are the blueprint and its management and lifecycle, a one stop shop for Cloud services and the management of resources in the PaaS level (including elasticity). 4CaaSt also provides a portfolio of ready to use Cloud native services and Cloud- aware immigrant technologies

Go with the Flow - Design of Cloud Logistics Service Blueprints

By adopting principles of cloud computing to the \ logistics domain the paradigm of Cloud Logistics is derived. It \ appears to be a promising paradigm in order to evolve logistics \ into being more flexible and collaborative. Yet, appropriate \ concepts that enable the cloud logistics paradigm are missing. \ In the paper, existing body of literature is reviewed and a \ definition and a framework of cloud logistics is given. Further, \ service blueprinting is combined with domain engineering and \ general morphological analysis in order to create a suitable \ method for designing cloud oriented service blueprints. Those \ are focusing on domain-specific flows and transformations \ enabling cloud oriented business collaboration. The method \ is applied to the logistics domain and a cloud logistics service \ blueprint is designed. Finally, the concept is evaluated with \ real use cases from logistics service providers

Cloud Computing and ERP: An Academic Literature Review (2010 - 2015)

The research history relating to Cloud ERP literature is investigated for the period of 2010 to 2015, with the aim of introducing an overview of academic research on the subject and to identify gaps in the literature in the stated period. Up to date literature in 37 research papers from various topics and sources has been discussed. Shortlisted publications are analysed and categorized into architecture, implementation, customization, mobility, benefits and disadvantages, and others. It appears that high attention has been paid by researchers to the benefits and disadvantages of Cloud ERP adoption as well as to its architecture and overarching plans for implementation. However, important issues such as integration of Cloud ERP with existing on-site legacy ERP systems and the quality of service given by respective cloud-based providers has been devoted limited attention by the authors reviewed

Assessing and Improving Library Technology with Service Blueprinting

Objective: The objective of this article is to illustrate the application of service blueprinting—a design tool that comes from the service design tradition—for assessing and improving library technology services. Setting: A mid-sized library at a public university in the western United States. Methods: A service blueprint was co-created by library and IT staff in a design workshop in order to map the operational flow of a data visualization display wall. Results: Guided by the service blueprint, the project team identified points of improvement for the service of the data visualization display wall, and developed recommendations to aid further applications of service blueprinting. Conclusions: Ultimately, service blueprinting was found to be a useful tool that can be applied to assess and improve library technology services

Control System as a Service : Standardizing Service Model and Pricing Principles

The service business has aided manufacturers to supplement their new equipment sales across many fields of businesses. The service business has proven to generate steady portions of total revenues, but even larger percentual portion of total profits. Since customers have the tendency to focus more and more on their core competencies and capabilities, services have grown stead-ily day in and out. Not many studies have been made about the potential that a control system as a service can provide to a company. Through market saturation and globally competitive markets, companies meet the challenges to operate effectively in the service business, have a standardized way of working and to price their services optimally. In this master’s thesis I will explain how services and service portfolio can be standardized and what pricing principles are to be considered for them. First, the servitization as a trend in an industrial context is reviewed along with service strategies and service orientation. Also, the pricing contexts around services and the value aspect of it are reviewed. Lastly, the literature review highlights cloud services with a comparison to traditional IT services. Next, I will study how the offerings can be readjusted to offer control systems as a service with the help of cloud services and what costs to take into considerations, and how the pricing of the service could include. By comparing a traditional model and a service model, the total cost of ownership during the lifecycle has different phases. The total cost of ownership is calculated to be less for a traditional model during one traditional lifecycle. However, as a new lifecycle is initialized with a lot of in-vestment costs for software and hardware, thereby making the service model is yet again cheaper for the next couple of years. Consequently, the comparison between the models is dependent on the customer preferences and their IT strategy; the level of outsourcing it wants to practice, what cost structure it wants to pursue, and how much predictability it can have for the future, as a traditional model is not as scalable as a service model.Palveluliiketoiminta on auttanut yrityksiä täydentämään uusien tuotetarjontaansa monilla liike-toiminta-alueilla. Palveluliiketoiminnan on osoitettu tuottavan tasaista, mutta usein jopa muuta liiketoimintaa suurempaa kokonaistuottoa yritysten tuloksista. Asiakkaiden keskittyminen ydin-toimintaansa on kasvattanut muiden osa-alueiden ulkoistamista. Automaatiojärjestelmien tuottamista palveluna ei juurikaan löydy tutkimustuloksia. Markkinoi-den kyllästymisen sekä maailmanlaajuisen kilpailun vuoksi palveluliiketoiminnalla haetaan opti-maalisia malleja kilpailuun ja uusiin ydinkyvykkyyksiin. Tässä tutkielmassa tutkitaan, miten palvelut ja palveluportfolio voidaan standardoida ja mitä hinnoitteluperiaatteita kohdeyritys voisi tarjonnassaan hyödyntää. Ensiksi tarkastellaan palve-lullistamista trendinä teollisessa kontekstissa yhdessä kanssa. Myös palvelujen hinnoittelua ja sen arvoa tarkastellaan. Lopuksi kirjallisuuskatsauksessa korostetaan pilvipalveluja verrattuna perinteisiin IT-ratkaisuihin. Seuraavaksi tutkin, kuinka nykyinen tarjontamalli voidaan muokata tarjoamaan automaatiojär-jestelmää palveluna pilvipalvelujen avulla. Myös kustannusrakennemuutokset sekä palveluhin-noittelu ja sen tulevat menetelmät otetaan huomioon. Vertaamalla perinteistä mallia ja palvelumallia, kokonaiskustannuksilla elinkaaren aikana on eri vaiheita. Perinteisen mallin kokonaiskustannusten lasketaan olevan pienemmät yhden järjestel-män perinteisen elinkaaren aikana. Sen sijaan, heti uuden elinkaaren alkaessa, kohdistuu asiak-kaalle paljon ohjelmistojen ja laitteistojen investointikustannuksia, jolloin palvelumallin kustan-nusrakenteen arvioidaan muodostuvan kustannusnäkökulmasta asiakkaalle muutamaksi vuo-deksi edullisemmaksi. Näin ollen, mallien vertailu riippuu asiakkaan mieltymyksistä ja heidän IT-strategiastaan; kuinka paljon ulkoistamista asiakas haluaa järjestelmälleen ja minkälaista kustannusrakennetta se suo-sii liiketoiminnassaan. Myös ennustettavuus on järjestelmäkontekstissa merkitsevää, sillä palve-lumallin skaalautuvuus tuo paljon etuja perinteisiin investointiprojekteihin verrattuna

Service Engineering Based on Service Oriented Architecture Methodology

Service Engineering (SE) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) originally reside on different plateaus of discipline. SE is defined as a set of activity introducing a new business service, while SOA is a technical approach to redefine an enterprise business processes as a set of IT enabled services. This paper proposes a SOA embedded SE framework as a comprehensive approach in re-defining business service and its IT implementation. After an introduction, a review of existing SE frameworks and SOA methodologies is presented in the paper. Afterward, a complete SE framework is proposed with several results on early case studies. A survey results are then presented to prove the usability and benefit of the proposed framework. The framework is designed and proposed to help practitioners and researchers to conduct service engineering by employing principles and methodology offered by SOA approach

Service Innovation | A Service Blueprinting for Industry4.0

This research aims to conceptualize a service blueprinting framework to map the digital interaction and shared access to service system resources in Industry 4.0 operations. From the literature review we found that in Industry 4.0 operations, customer and provider are value co-creators, and thus, mapping the service process using such service blueprinting becomes useful to boost new dynamics generating positive and measurable innovation outcomes using either quantitative or qualitative indicators, indexed to the different stakeholders’ concerns. As recommended by the of Service Science, wealth comes from service innovation among service systems, so, it is necessary to know at the outset which resources are involved in value propositions along the service process. With this research, we have conceptualized an innovative service blueprinting framework for the digital innovation to visualize the bridge between the physical world and the virtual world in Industry 4.0 operations