On Cloud Economics, Pricing and Revenue Management

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "On Cloud Economics, Pricing and Revenue Management"

by

Mr. Abadhan Sabyasachi


Abstract:

Cloud computing offers datacenter resources On-demand for hosting applications 
as a utility, which is a major shift in the IT service delivery model. That 
help busimnesses and organizations to access complex and expensive IT 
facilities offered by the cloud service provider (CSP) without large up-front 
investment to establish their own IT infrastructure. Recently large investments 
have been made in cloud datacenters impacting business models to be based on 
its cost benefits. Much research has been focused on various economic issues in 
cloud computing and datacenters such as, pricing models, cost-optimization 
techniques, billing and chargeback model, and economic/business objectives. 
Related to this context there has been a significant research aiming to 
minimise costs for cloud users however, less attention has been paid to address 
the challenges faced by the cloud providers striving for revenue or profit 
maximisation.

Our literature survey focuses on the application of Revenue Management concepts 
in cloud computing environments, particularly on the 
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) level with the prices offered are important 
factors. Revenue Management deals with complex decision making process related 
to sales, market demand, and pricing strategies of services from a CSP's 
perspective. The survey include, market and economics-inspired pricing 
strategies, mechanisms and algorithms to address the profit/revenue 
maximization problem of CSPs. Two types of CSPs are considered: 1) Single cloud 
provider model where a CSP relies only on its own resources to serve the 
clients and 2) Mutiple cloud provider model where a CSP participates in a cloud 
federation to benefit from sharing resource sharing. Survey covers resource 
provisioning policies, capacity control mechanisms, dynamic pricing methoids, 
auctions bidding strategies for profit maximization bothe in a single monopoly 
cloud market as well as in a cloud federation with multiple cloud with 
competetion and cooperation among CSPs. Consumers perspective also became 
important where, consumers seem to prefer a well-known cloud service platform 
instead of comparing the price/availability rate of different CSPs or between 
the services of a single CSP and then choosing the cheapest. Consumers have 
various cloud resource/service requirements depending on their business, and 
CSPs with limited resource capacities/flexibilities face challenge of how to 
sell their resources/services efficiently. To address distinctive consumer 
preferences, CSPs can offer numerous classes of services according to some SLA 
which are priced differently. The CSPs allocating their datacenter capacity to 
various types of consumers which may be incentivised to maximize its output and 
total revenue yielded. After knowing the consumers preferences and then 
designing the services accordingly, the CSP may face the challenge of how to 
set price for different services and how this pricing may impact the resource 
utilization. One dimension to this problem is how CSPs would make decision 
about whether to accept or reject users requests for services when the 
resources become scarce.


Date:			Thursday, 10 December 2015

Time:                  	2:30pm - 4:30pm

Venue:                  Room 5508
                         Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Jogesh Muppala (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Brahim Bensaou (Chairperson)
 			Prof. Gary Chan
 			Dr. Wei Wang


**** ALL are Welcome ****