Cloud Computing: New Business Opportunities for Telecommunications Companies?

Cloud computing has recently shifted into the center of attention of Telecommuications Companies. Deutsche Telekom, for example, just announced the importance of cloud computing as one of their leading growth sectors (Deutsche Telekom Press Release, 2010). Also other important telecommunication players such as AT&T, Vodafone and Telefónica are expanding their cloud computing business. Clearly, these developments indicate that telcos believe that cloud computing provides significant business opportunities, particularly by further driving the convergence of telecommunications and information technology. Some researchers, however (cf. Greelan, 2009) state that cloud computing is nothing more than a marketing buzzword. On the other hand, Weiss (2007) mentions that although cloud computing "is a buzzword almost designed to be vague, [it] is more than just a lot of fog". In an effort to shed more light on this debate, we investigate the business opportunities of cloud computing for telecommunication companies in more detail. Thereby, we focus especially on the factors that might especially qualify telcos in becoming a significant player in this emerging domain. More specifically, our contribution is twofold: First, we indentify technical and economic factors that are relevant for the telcos' competitive position in the cloud computing market. Second, we identify future scenarios on how telcos position themselves in this market. --Cloud Computing,Telecommunications,Conjoint Analysis

TOWARDS AN EFFICIENT DECISION POLICY FOR CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDERS

Cloud service providers may face the problem of how to price infrastructure services and how this pricing may impact the resource utilization. One aspect of this problem is how Cloud service providers would decide to accept or reject requests for services when the resources for offering these services become scarce. A decision support policy called Customized Bid-Price Policy (CBPP) is proposed in this paper to decide efficiently, when a large number of services or complex services can be offered over a finite time horizon. This heuristic outperforms well-known policies, if bid prices cannot be updated frequently during incoming requests and an automated update of bid prices is required to achieve more accurate decisions. Since CBPP approximates the revenue offline before the requests occur, it has a low runtime compared to other approaches during the online phase. The performance is examined via simulation and the pre-eminence of CBPP is statistically proven

Biased project status reports: A survey of IS professionals

This paper summarizes an empirical investigation that explored biased project reporting by Information Systems (IS) professionals. The study is based on a survey of 91 professionals who were involved with system implementations in various governmental agencies. Our investigation assessed the impact of project importance, control, structure, and size on biasing behaviors. To formulate the research hypotheses for our study, we adopted a Message Exchange Perspective. The results reveal that IS professionals are more likely to bias their project status communications when working in projects that are (1) large, (2) important, and (3) lack controls. The practical and research implications of our findings are discussed

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

Cloud Services from a Consumer Perspective

Although there is an increased attention on Cloud Computing in the academic literature in the recent years, most research work focus on technical aspects of cloud computing. Research on consumers’ preferences for cloud services is limited to studies from consulting and industry companies. This paper fills the gap by empirically identifying consumer preferences for cloud service attributes. Using conjoint methods we reveal the relative importance of different attributes of cloud services. The results help both practitioners and academic researchers to better understand the prerequisites of a successful market introduction of cloud services and to design appropriate services. Moreover, the derived information enables a more accurate service differentiation and offers possibilities for second degree price discrimination

Cloud Computing – A Classification, Business Models and Research Directions

Lately, a new computing paradigm has emerged: “Cloud Computing”. It seems to be promoted as heavily as the “Grid” was a few years ago, causing broad discussions on the differences between Grid and Cloud Computing. The first contribution of this paper is thus a detailed discussion about the different characteristics of Grid Computing and Cloud Computing. This technical classification allows for a well-founded discussion of the business opportunities of the Cloud Computing paradigm. To this end, this paper first presents a business model framework for Clouds. It subsequently reviews and classifies current Cloud offerings in the light of this framework. Finally, this paper discusses challenges that have to be mastered in order to make the Cloud vision come true and points to promising areas for future research

Consumer Preferences and Bid-Price Control for Cloud Services

Consumers have different preferences regarding Cloud services. Providers of Cloud services can be limited in their resource capacities or flexibility, and they are exposed to the challenge of how to sell their services efficiently. In this thesis both views are examined. A survey was conducted to understand the consumers\u27 perception of Revenue Management methods. For providers, a decision support policy is proposed to decide efficiently, when to accept or reject consumer requests