Research On The Business Model Of Cloud Architecture Based On Service Ontology

The dissertation takes a value viewpoint, from a supplier perspective, to address the question of what would be the constitution of the business model of Cloud Computing that is capable of covering the functional and non-functional properties of e-service elements and the interactions within a network of stakeholders.An acceptable definition describes a business model as a concise specification to illustrate how a firm obtains and integrates the interrelated in-house components in the fields of strategy, organization, and operation in order to establish the competitive advantage in defined markets. Tracing the evolution of the business model concept from definitions and taxonomies, component lists, to descriptions of business elements, the study of the business model ontology attempts to model and formalize the essential components of a business model. Historically, the question of how to make profit plays the important role in the areas of the business model research. Analyzing the components of a business model is necessary to understand the source of benefits. However, some scholars alleged that a business model involved two mechanisms of both value creation and value capture, as well as the fundamental of value creation generated from various fields. Ontology may elaborate the creation and exchange of economic value between the stakeholders from a value perspective.As a conceptual modeling approach to Ontology, the initiation and progression of the service ontology have been pushed by increasing centralization and complexity of the e-service offers, as well as by growing decentralization and heterogeneity of the e-service actors, like the service provision of Cloud Computing. In a conventional business context, a service offering may reflect intangible resource transactions of stakeholders, which are generally regulated and governed by legitimate rules. The stakeholders may also take some specific activities in a service process. In an e-service context, this thesis acknowledges the contributions of the related literatures to define the functionalities of services from a provider perspective, including the core function, the supporting and enhancing supplementary functions, which represent in essence a description of what a service can do. Further, the non-functional properties of services that are identified by a collection of availability, price, cost, obligations, quality, security, operationalization etc. are fundamental for the discovery, selection, comparison, negotiation of e-services.The motivation to select the concept of the business model of "Cloud Architecture", instead of "Cloud Computing", is to distinguish the precondition on the basis of a supplier viewpoint from the extensive domains of Cloud Computing. Cloud architecture is a set of resource categories:software, information, and infrastructure (hardware) that the Cloud service providers possess to achieve business benefits. The concept of Cloud Architecture can relatively accurately describe the theoretical basis on components, elements, interactions, activities of Cloud services.The significance of this research is to present formal, practical, and concrete contributions over the divergent conceptual discussions aiming at the interrelated areas of the business model of Cloud Computing. The contributions contain (1) to construct a collection of service elements of Cloud Architecture handled by an innovative approach to decompose,category, and assemble the composite businesses of Cloud;(2) to build the models of the service configuration and value exchange in terms of the service ontology;(3) to make a qualitive analysis for service security, risk, privacy, and regulation, as well as establish the quantative models to simulate the mechanisms of investing and pricing of service suppliers and the transfer decision of consumer from private IT infrastructure to public Cloud that rely on Matlab programmes.