Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Thanks to the B2B gateway, the message exchange is secured and therefore
allows Andago to monitor the hosting environments. It can determine how much to
pay Saygah and Sunny depending on the usage as well as on the experience deliv-
ered (reliable hosting or not for instance).
12.3 Business Benefits
12.3.1 Customer Benefits in Online Gaming
There are different customer types that can benefit from the VHE approach. Firstly,
the end user or gamer will indirectly benefit from the VHE as he will be given a
wider range of games at different levels of quality with more adequate and competi-
tive pricing models.
Secondly, traditional service providers (SP) who contented themselves with
providing raw communications services (typical of ISPs) will now be able to offer
additional capabilities as services in a SaaS approach. Such services include, as
already mentioned, identity and access control management services, encryption
services, SLA services, CRM services, telecommunications services (call-backs,
the sending of SMS, etc), and generally any capability the enterprise has internally
and is willing to share with external customers in order to generate revenue. This has
been clearly identified in Total Telecom Magazine (2009). In particular it highlights
that the “huge cost of developing massive multiplayer online games (MMOG) could
mean an increasing opportunity for network infrastructure and data warehousing
service providers as games publishers increasingly try to move away from providing
the end-to-end 'vertical”.
Thirdly, game developers and web gaming platforms also benefit from the VHE
approach as they can focus on developing new game titles and creating appealing
user platforms without having to worry about the details of operating the plat-
form, the game, or any of the underlying infrastructure along with the non-func-
tional requirements (such as security and QoS) these bring. Again, Total Telecom
Magazine states that “because MMOGs are persistent online games that are
commonly played by hundreds or thousands of players on one hardware server at
the same time, support costs can be high”. These costs need to be controlled and
driven down. Piers Harding-Rolls (a senior analyst at Screen Digest) states that “a
popular game might have tens of servers each with a few thousand players”. This is
the main cause for the expensive infrastructure and maintenance when owned and
operated by the game developer. A pay-as-you-grow or pay-as-you-go provision
model can help reduce such costs.
12.3.2 The VHE as an Enabler of the SOA Approach
The VHE enables the customer to adopt a low risk approach to SOA deployment
and increases Return on Investment (RoI). The VHE provides common, shared tech-
nologies that enable business processes to be added and changed easily. Expensive
infrastructure is pooled, decreasing the support and maintenance costs, allowing
