The evolution process of the Cloud Computing Business Model

Masterarbeit aus dem Jahr 2012 im Fachbereich Informatik - Technische Informatik, Ewha Womans University, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: “It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign.”1 Richard Stallmann, founder of Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU (GNU’s Not Unix), quoted in The Guardian about Cloud Computing paradigm on September 29, 2008. Without any doubts Cloud Computing – is THE current buzzword in the information and telecommunication industry since 2007. The hype around Cloud Computing is impressive, but also confusing, as Stallmann’s quotation reveals. Among various market research institutes, governmental agencies of different countries or business consultancies, the market of Cloud Computing services will increase immense. For example, Forrester Research predicts that the global market from $ 40,7 billion in 2010 will rise to $ 241 billion per year by 2020 (Ried, Kisker 2011, p. 3). The existence and enormous growth of the Cloud Computing services is obvious, but mere the fact, what exactly is Cloud Computing, still occurs for confusion. The scholars around Armbrust et al. (2010) quoted Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, “The interesting thing about Cloud Computing is that we’ve redefined Cloud Computing to include everything that we already do. . . . I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of Cloud Computing other than change the wording of some of our ads.” The term Cloud Computing is used in the Information Technology (IT) industry and research area for about four years and is consider as the next revolution of the IT sector. Although the phenomenon of Cloud Computing is still in its infant stage, it is considered to be a strategic change point of information technology (Chorafas 2011, p. 58). Among many scholars Cloud Computing is seen as an innovation of computing, Koch and Breul (2009) discuss: “If industry analysts are correct, we are at an inflection point — a true paradigm change — in the evolution of computing.” The evolution process of Cloud Computing is diversified and will be discuss in more detail in the subsequent section 2.4 of this paper. The main problem remains about Cloud Computing paradigm is a widely accepted definition of Cloud Computing services (Vaquero et al. 2009).Hence, even for service providers and consumers it is difficult to delimit the area of Cloud Computing services.