Product Performance Based Business Models: A Service Based Perspective

The migration to a service based economy has led many firms to emphasize the service component of their product offerings. This shift has led to the emergence of a business model based on value creation through product utilization, where products are sold as a service, (often referred to as Servicization or product-service systems) The Servicization business model can be applied to both tangible and intangible, information intensive, products and is based on aligning customer and supplier incentives.A shift to a service based model leads to a variety of managerial questions that concern performance metrics, customer supplier relationships and contracting and resource optimization. The paper will review how current research on Servicization relates to these questions. We will also consider the implications of the Servicization paradigm for areas in information management such as cloud computing and decision support systems

Customer Knowledge Management In the Cloud Ecosytem

The evolution of the economy has gone through the agricultural era, followed by the industrial era focusing on the production of goods and the postindustrial era accentuated by information and services. The new economy of the 21stcentury is characterized by knowledge and relationships. Galbreath (2002) described the transition to a new economic order driven by knowledge and based on the value of relationships. Customer knowledge management (CKM) synthesizes the customer knowledge and relationships assets in the extended enterprise to create advantages for companies in a very competitive market. Technologies have changed alongside the economy. Big Data and Cloud Computing are the latest stages of the evolution of technologies in business. This paper builds upon the work done in the areas of Customer Relationship Management, Knowledge Management, Big Data and Cloud Computing. It examines the CKM process enabled by a dynamic actionable demand driven service platform leveraging Big Data, knowledge analytics, and cloud computing

Cloud-based Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Consumption for Sharing Economy

Cloud computing has been a dominant paradigm for a variety of information processing platforms, particularly for enabling various popular applications of sharing economy. However, there is a major concern regarding data privacy on these cloud-based platforms. This work presents novel cloud-based privacy-preserving solutions to support collaborative consumption applications for sharing economy. In typical collaborative consumption, information processing platforms need to enable fair cost-sharing among multiple users for utilizing certain shared facilities and communal services. Our cloud-based privacy-preserving protocols, based on homomorphic Paillier cryptosystems, can ensure that the cloud-based operator can only obtain an aggregate schedule of all users in facility sharing, or a service schedule conforming to service provision rule in communal service sharing, but is unable to track the personal schedules or demands of individual users. More importantly, the participating users are still able to settle cost-sharing among themselves in a fair manner for the incurred costs, without knowing each other's private schedules or demands. Our privacy-preserving protocols involve no other third party who may compromise privacy. We also provide an extensive evaluation study and a proof-of-concept system prototype of our protocols.Comment: To appear in IEEE Trans. Cloud Computin

A WS-Agreement Based SLA Implementation for the CMAC Platform

The emerging transformation from a product oriented economy to a service oriented economy based on Cloud environments envisions new scenarios where actual QoS (Quality of Service) mechanisms need to be redesigned. In such scenarios new models to negotiate and manage Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are necessary. An SLA is a formal contract which defines acceptable service levels to be provided by the Service Provider to its customers in measurable terms. SLAs are an essential component in building Cloud systems where commitments and assurances are specified, implemented, monitored and possibly negotiable. This is meant to guarantee that consumers’ service quality expectations can be achieved. In fact, the level of customer satisfaction is crucial in Cloud environments, making SLAs one of the most important and active research topics. This paper presents an SLA implementation for negotiation, monitoring and renegotiation of agreements for Cloud services based on the CMAC (Condition Monitoring on A Cloud) platform. CMAC offers condition monitoring services in cloud computing environments to detect events on assets as well as data storage services