Information Technology Reference
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by either an in-house Grid infrastructure or by utilizing the resources of an external
resource provider such as Amazon, Sun Microsystems and IBM. The difference to
the previous case is that the service is now offered through the web and charged via a
monthly (rental) fee i.e. no license is needed from the customer's side. Furthermore,
no specific software needs to be installed in the client machine as a standard web
browser is all that is required to access the service.
As we enter a technological era where solutions based on
Service Oriented
Architectures
(SOA) and
Cloud Computing
will constitute a large segment of the
market for business services, it is most likely that Grid-related services will be inte-
grated into this framework. Therefore, the business models will evolve and be adapted
accordingly. For example, SaaS will become more dominate over the
Software-
as-a-Product
(SaaP) model for Grid services provisioning and the added-value of
these services will be focusing around the collaboration benefits, rather than just in
the performance related benefits. A similar emerging B2B collaboration scenario,
that could drive new models, would be the services related to Virtual Organisations
(VOs). In a VO, different organizations share resources, either computational or
data, to achieve all partners' goals. VOs can be easily created and administrated by
utilising Grid services e.g. by taking advantage of the Globus Open Grid Services
Architecture (OGSA, http://www.globus.org/ogsa/) framework.
To summarise, looking at the Grid service and application provider's perspec-
tive, the well-established business models such as the SaaS, SaaP, Open-Source,
and Value-added-Services (VAS) ones still apply in the Grid environment. However,
there are a number of important factors that must be taken into account by a new
business when adapting these traditional scenarios to the Grid, especially in regards
to licensing, pricing models and legal issues. For example questions like these
should be taken into account: what is the right license and pricing model to use for
Grid SaaS? How do I protect the Intellectual Property Rights in a geographically
dispersed collaboration scenario? How do the relationships and flows (tangible and
intangible ones) in a value network change in the case of a VO where the common
benefits are spread over a number of participants?
In order to build a successful business case all the previous questions need to
be answered. This can only be achieved through a process of building a business
model and planning, through 1) careful analysis and evaluation of the technical
requirements 2) the surrounding business environment and market conditions and
the 3) target market. An example process for that purpose tailored to the Grid case
is presented next.
5.3 Establishing a Business Model Based on the “Grid Benefit”
As discussed in the previous section, a business model seeks to transform economic
inputs into valuable economic outputs. In order to achieve that, it needs to provide
and support information and propositions on several fronts starting from the anal-
ysis of the requirements for developing the product, to explicitly defining the value
proposition and the target customers. Furthermore, it needs to elaborate on the
