J. Theor. Appl. Electron. Commer. Res., Volume 8, Issue 3 (December 2013) – 6 articles

In recent years, there have been two major trends in the ICT industry: green computing and cloud computing. Green computing implies that the ICT industry has become a significant energy consumer and consequently, a major source of CO2 emissions. Cloud computing makes it possible to purchase IT resources as a service without upfront costs. In this paper, the combination of these two trends, green cloud computing, will first be evaluated based on existing research findings, which indicate that private clouds are the most green option to offer services. Hosting of private clouds can be outsourced, which allows companies to focus on their core competences. Furthermore, three case studies of state-of-the-art companies offering green hosting services are presented and incentives affecting their energy-efficiency development are analyzed. The results reveal that currently there is no demand in the market for green hosting services, because the only incentive for companies is low costs. Service providers should illustrate their greenness with transparent efficiency metrics, draw up green service level agreements and compete with greenness. Then it is up to end users to require more green web services and create derived demand for green cloud services and green hosting services. Full article

Cloudsourcing involves considerably greater risks to data than do insourcing or conventional outsourcing. A generic data risk assessment identifies key concerns in relation to harm arising from threats impinging on vulnerabilities in the cloud. Guidance is provided as to appropriate safeguards to address those risks. Most services lack those safeguards, implying that individuals and user organisations need to be far more careful in their use of cloud services. Full article

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm that allows users to conveniently access computing resources as pay-per-use services. Whereas cloud offerings such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Google Apps are rapidly gaining a large user base, enterprise software’s migration towards the cloud is still in its infancy. For software vendors the move towardscloud solutions implies profound changes in their value-creation logic. Not only are they forced to deliver fully web-enabled solutions and to replace their license model with service fees, they also need to build the competencies to host and manage business-critical applications for their customers. This motivates our research, which investigates cloud computing’s implications for enterprise software vendors’ business models. From multiple case studies covering traditional and pure cloud providers, we find that moving from on-premise software to cloud services affects all business model components, that is, the customer value proposition, resource base, value configuration, and financial flows. It thus underpins cloud computing’s disruptive nature in the enterprise software domain. By deriving two alternative business model configurations, SaaS and SaaS+PaaS, our research synthesizes the strategic choices for enterprise software vendors and provides guidelines for designing viable business models. Full article

Social commerce is doing commerce in a collaborative and participative way, by using social media, through an enterprise interactive interface that enables social interactions. Technologies such as Web 2.0, Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enable social commerce. Yet, a framework for social commerce, putting Enterprise Social Interactions as central entities, would provide a strong business justification for social commerce design and adoption with these enabling technologies. This work first proposes a framework for social commerce-oriented business that captures: (a) three main entities: Enterprise social Interactions, Actors, and Business Processes (and their output: products/services), (b) the relationships between these entities, and (c) the constraints (if any). Then, it focuses on the conceptualization of the key entity, Enterprise Social Interactions, to shape the required enterprise interface that promotes openness, collaboration and participation, which enables the required knowledge emergence and intelligence for the value (co-)creation. A central component of the enterprise technology architecture, we refer to as Enterprise Social Interaction Manager (ESIM) realizes the interface. An example shows how the realization of the ESIM functionalities with Web 2.0, Cloud computing, and SOA enables the different categories of collaborative B2B integration that underlines and backs social commerce. Full article

This paper extends the on-going analysis of the electronic markets hypothesis by offering a complementary hypothesis, namely, the electronic hybrids hypothesis. In a seminal 1987 article, Malone, Yates, and Benjamin predicted an overall shift toward proportionately more use of electronic markets rather than electronic hierarchies. However, critics of this hypothesis have highlighted various factors that are responsible for its limited predictive validity, in particular for electronic business-to-business (B2B) commerce. This paper revisits transaction cost economics and the electronic markets literature to identify five inhibiting factors that have led to a much narrower shift than that predicted by the electronic markets hypothesis. The main argument developed in this paper is that the growing use of cloud computing is expected to mitigate those inhibiting factors and consequently lead to a further shift toward electronic markets. However, because the inhibiting factors are mitigated, but not eliminated, cloud computing has the potential to shift electronic B2B commerce toward more open, loosely-coupled exchanges, without electronic markets becoming the dominant mode of governance. Full article