Emerging Business Models
By emerging business models we mean those that describe future commercial applications for Grid computing. These models mainly correspond to the emerging B2B environments. A short survey is included in this document. Variants on ASP (Application Service Providers) like IBSP (Internet Business Service Providers) and ISV (Independent Software Vendors) have been identified as models for innovative network-centric applications that may benefit from Grid technologies.
Essentially the ASP model consists of the hiring of applications to customers that do not make the investment required for owning the application. Typical characteristics of an ASP business model are shortly summarised as:
Delivered over a network. This means that the application is not located at the customer site.
Externally managed. The service provider manages the service and the customer is unaware of the details.
One-to-many service. The provider aims at servicing many clients. The customisation must be minimal.
Service-fee-based pricing. The fee may be based on a subscription or on occasions on variable consumption parameters as time, number of users or transaction count.
Contract fulfilment. Usually an agreed SLA guarantees the availability and quality of the service.
Generally speaking, an IBSP is an ASP that develops its own applications specifically for hosting in the web, instead of enabling existing applications for the internet. IBSP provide software as a utility using the pay-per-use subscription model. The end customer does not need to purchase, install, or maintain expensive hardware or software. This saves time, eliminates support costs, and minimizes the hardware expense. IBSP usually embrace multi-tenant hosting, in which a single group of powerful servers delivers the application to all customers, creating economies of scale and lowering costs dramatically. Revenues are directly tied to subscriptions. An IBSP is typically built as a well-designed web site. It is designed specifically for the end user and with the intention that staff training takes only a short time (much shorter that in traditional ASP models). The content is accessed by a web interface that is usually created for anyones use. This way the navigation is greatly simplified. Typical applications accessed by an IBSP are e-mail, ERP and CRM. In the future, entertainment applications such as high-performance gaming by means of grid technologies are expected to follow this model.
Some other envisaged business models are:
Financial online portals where investors can calculate their preferred financial portfolio themselves.
Financial service providers using the grid infrastructure as a resource to sell on-demand customized forecasts of financial portfolios to banks and financial firms.
- Figure 1: the envisaged Financial Portfolio Management, as mentioned above
About
This work was produced by the BEinGRID project
