Taxonomy of Grid Business Models

Abstract

Grid Computing, initially intended to provide access to computational resources for high-performance computing applications, broadened its focus by addressing computational needs of enterprises. It became concerned with coordinating the on-demand, usage-based allocation of resources in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations, and eventually creating new business models based on this technology. This trend in Grid computing holds a lot of potential in many industries with respect to saving costs, improving efficiency, creating new services and products, increasing product quality, as well as improving collaboration between companies. This will change the way business is done and it will change our classical view of the value chains, its stakeholders, and their roles. However, in order to encourage more companies to adopt Grid computing, value chains have to be explained and business models have to be understood. This paper makes a first move in this direction. It analyses existing business models. Based on the result of the analysis, it formally defines a taxonomy of existing and future roles that a stakeholder can take on within the value chains of the Grid and gives examples of those roles. Finally, this paper applies the taxonomy to two reference business models: utility computing and software-as-a-service.