Strategic Decision Support for Smart-Leasing Infrastructure-as-a-Service

In this work we formulate strategic decision models describing when and how many reserved instances should be bought when outsourcing workload to an IaaS provider. Current IaaS providers offer various pricing options for leasing computing resources. When decision makers are faced with the choice and most importantly with uneven workloads, the decision at which time and with which type of computing resource to work is no longer trivial. We present case studies taken from the online services industry and present solution models to solve the various use case problems and compare them. Following a thorough numerical analysis using both real, as well as augmented workload traces in simulations, we found that it is cost efficient to (1) have a balanced portfolio of resource options and (2) avoiding commitments in the form of upfront payments when faced with uncertainty. Compared to a simple IaaS benchmark, this allows cutting costs by 20%

Next Generation Outsourcing – A Research Agenda Guided By Practice

Over the last decades outsourcing has established itself as widely accepted management practice. Information systems researchers have spent considerable effort in studying the outsourcing phenomenon and theorizing about it. Through the interaction between research and practice, as well as through own experiences, industry managers underwent a noticeable learning curve. This poses the question: is research still up to date or do we need to think about the next stage, a form of next generation outsourcing? To investigate this issue, expert interviews with thirteen sourcing managers from different industries have been conducted. The aim was to learn about the state of outsourcing management in practice and to identify what the new topics are which keep outsourcing managers awake at night. The basis for the structured interviews was a thorough analysis of the outsourcing literature. Building on these the interviewees were asked to discuss their experiences and to highlight current issues of concern. We identified four emerging topics which call for further research: (1) Multi-vendor Outsourcing and Sourcing Networks, (2) Cloud Computing and its implications for outsourcing, (3) Risk Management of Outsourcing, and (4) Methods to bridge the Offshoring gap

The Multi-shop Ski Rental Problem

We consider the {\em multi-shop ski rental} problem. This problem generalizes the classic ski rental problem to a multi-shop setting, in which each shop has different prices for renting and purchasing a pair of skis, and a \emph{consumer} has to make decisions on when and where to buy. We are interested in the {\em optimal online (competitive-ratio minimizing) mixed strategy} from the consumer's perspective. For our problem in its basic form, we obtain exciting closed-form solutions and a linear time algorithm for computing them. We further demonstrate the generality of our approach by investigating three extensions of our basic problem, namely ones that consider costs incurred by entering a shop or switching to another shop. Our solutions to these problems suggest that the consumer must assign positive probability in \emph{exactly one} shop at any buying time. Our results apply to many real-world applications, ranging from cost management in \texttt{IaaS} cloud to scheduling in distributed computing