Mitigating the Effects of Partial Resource Failures for Cloud Providers

Competition for users on a global market is fierce, forcing enterprises to provide for better, faster services while offering the same more cheaply. At the same time, users choose to remain oblivious of the infrastructure behind the service – only demanding that it works. Cloud service failures and inefficient management of such failures can result in significant financial cost, loss of reputation for providers, and drive key customers away. At the same time failure situations can never be completely avoided. To mitigate their effects we present a decision model for providers to help them decide which jobs to keep running and which to cancel in order to minimize loss of revenue and key customers during partial resource failures. The results of the evaluation of the model and its extension show its ability to significantly improve revenue. Furthermore the model can also help to reduce the number of cancelled jobs

CLOUD SERVICE REVENUE MANAGEMENT

Successful Internet service offerings can only thrive if customers are satisfied with service performance. While large service providers can usually cope with fluctuations of customer visits retaining acceptable Quality of Service, small and medium-sizes enterprises face a big challenge due to limited resources in the IT infrastructure. Popular services, such as justin.tv and SmugMug, rely on external resources provided by cloud computing providers in order to satisfy their customers demands at all times. The paradigm of cloud computing refers to the delivery model of computing services as a utility in a pay-as-you-go manner. In this paper, we provide and computationally evaluate decision models and policies that can help cloud computing providers increase their revenue under the realistic assumption of scarce resources and under both informational certainty and uncertainty of customers? resource requirement predictions. Our results show that in both cases under certainty and under uncertainty applying the dynamic pricing policy significantly increases revenue while using the client classification policy substantially reduces revenue. We also show that, for all policies, the presence of uncertainty causes losses in revenue; when the client classification policy is applied, losses can even amount to more than 8%

Scientific progress of design research artefacts

Many existing IT applications exhibit strongly varying demand patterns for resources. Accommodating an ever increasing and highly fluctuating demand requires continuous availability of sufficient resources. To achieve this state at reasonably costs, a high degree of flexibility with respect to the given IT infrastructure is necessary. Facing this challenge the idea of Cloud computing has been gaining interest. In so-called Clouds resources such as CPU, storage and bandwidth can be bundled into a single services, which are offered to Cloud users. These services can be accessed in oblivion of the underlying IT infrastructure. This way Cloud Computing facilitates the introduction of new products and services without large investments in the IT infrastructure. Cloud Computing is a promising approach with a high impact on business models. One aspect of business models is clearly the revenue model, which defines how prices should be set to achieve predefined revenue level. The decision about accepting or denying requests has a high impact on the revenue of the provider. In this paper we analyze two approaches that support the cloud provider in its decision. We show that predefined policies allow increasing revenue compared to widely used technical models such as first-come-first-serve

Management of Cloud Infastructures: Policy-Based Revenue Optimization

Competition on global markets forces many enterprises to make use of new applications, reduce process times and at the same time cut the costs of their IT-infrastructure. To achieve this, it is necessary to maintain a high degree of flexibility with respect to the IT-infrastructure. Facing this challenge the idea of Cloud computing has been gaining interest lately. Cloud services can be accessed on demand without knowledge of the underlying infrastructure and have already succeeded in helping companies deploy products faster. Using Cloud services the New York Times managed to convert scanned images containing 11 million articles into PDF within 24 hours at a cost of merely 240 US-$. However Cloud providers will only offer their services, if they can realize sufficient benefit. To achieve this, the efficiency of Cloud infrastructure management must be increased. To this end we propose the use of concepts from revenue management and further enhancements

Tagungsband zum Doctoral Consortium der WI 2009

Bereits seit Anfang der 1990er Jahre wird jungen Wissenschaftlern im Vorfeld der Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik ein Doctoral Consortium als unterstützendes Forum angeboten. Diese Einrichtung wurde auch zur größten internationalen Konferenz der Wirtschaftsinformatik, der WI 2009 in Wien fortgeführt. Dieser Band fasst die zum Vortrag ausgewählten Beiträge zusammen. Table of Contents: Tina Balke, On the Enforcement of Institutions for Reducing Uncertainty in Utility Computing Computational Economies …1; Christian Czarnecki, Gestaltung von Customer Relationship Management über die Grenzen von Telekommunikationsunternehmen hinweg …11; Christoph Danne, Assessing the cost of assortment complexity in consumer goods supply chains by reconfiguration of inventory and production planning parameters in response to assortment changes … 24; José M. González V., Gestaltung nachhaltiger IT-Landschaften in der Energiewirtschaft mit Hilfe von Referenzmodellen … 35; Christoph Habla, Eine Grobterminierungskomponente zur funktionalen Erweiterung von Manufacturing Execution Systems … 45; Frank Hogrebe, Integriertes Produkt- und Prozessmodell für die öffentliche Verwaltung … 55; Sebastian Hudert, A protocol-generic infrastructure for electronic SLA negotiations in the Internet of Services … 65; Bernd Jahn, Der Manager als Prosumer seines Unterstützungssystems - Ein Ansatz zum Entwurf Konfigurierbarer Managementunterstützungssysteme … 75; Florian Johannsen, Konzeption und Evaluation eines Ansatzes zur Methodenintegration im Qualitätsmanagement … 85; Karin Kronawitter, IT-Outsourcing in banking industry - stage of maturity model as strategic approach … 95; Barbara Krumay, Der Einuss von Online Kundenservice-Angeboten auf Kundenloyalität … 105; Tyge Kummer, Kulturelle Einflussfaktoren der Akzeptanz ambienter Systeme zur Vermeidung von Medikationsfehlern in Krankenhäusern … 115; Stefan König, Elektronische Verhandlungen im Internet-of-Services unter Berücksichtigung von Reputationsinformationen … 125; Tim Püschel, Intelligentes Ressourcenmanagement für Clouds - Konzept und Implementierung eines Entscheidungsmodells … 135; Olaf Reinhold, Auswirkungen auf die Gestaltung von CRM-Anwendungssystemen durch Kooperation von Unternehmen entlang von Wertschöpfungsketten und in Unternehmensnetzwerken … 144; Markus Ruch, Kundenindividuelle Steuerung von Transaktionsrisiken im E-Commerce … 155; Frank Schlosser, Die Bedeutung von operativem Business/IT-Alignment für nachhaltigen Unternehmenserfolg - Ein theoretisches Rahmenwerk und Richtlinien für die Praxis … 168; Christian Schultewolter, Konzeptuelle Modellierung für modellgetriebene Decision Support Systeme … 178; Gudrun Schütz, Preisstrategien von Internethändlern und deren technische Umsetzung … 188; Sarah Voltz, Prognose und Förderung des Verordnungsverhaltens von Ärzten in Netzwerkstrukturen … 198; -- Since the early 1990es, young researchers participate in the doctoral consortium series, co-located with the Wirtschaftsinformatik conference. This volume contains the selected papers of 20 PhD candidates of the 2009 doctoral consortium in Vienna.Wirtschaftsinformatik,Wirtschaftsinformatikstudium