No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
E-Marketplace for Cloud Services
Abstract
With the advent of Cloud Computing and the advantages it brings to businesses, there is a keen interest by businesses to adopt these technologies from a strategic advantage viewpoint. This growing interest throws up a challenge to businesses to identify solutions and providers that fits their requirements. It becomes difficult for them to locate and evaluate services provided by multiple Cloud Service Providers. This is exactly where the concept of an Electronic Marketplace for Cloud Services (EMPCS) would fit in. The Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB) or an intermediary is an enhanced type of EMPCS that simplifies the process further by a single-point, aggregated and customized solution. Using research literatures for reviewing existing models of an Electronic Marketplace (EMP) or Electronic Markets (EM) this research tries to identify core components that form part of a " state of the art " intermediary based EMP designed specifically for a Cloud Services.
... Electronic marketplace or e-marketplace as an online market environment over the internet where both sellers and buyers act as market players to exchange goods and services [18]. The authors in [19] defined a marketplace as an area of exchange in which many buyers and vendors meet in order to conduct business transactions. ...
... Thus, more and more business companies favor to do business on e-Market. There are three main functions of a marketplace according [18] matching of buyers and sellers, facilitate the exchange of information, goods and services, providing an infrastructure that enables the efficient functioning of the market. In [27], the author categorized E-marketplaces into different types according to their ownership or governance. ...
... The author in [18], developed a reference model for e-marketplaces that defines three phases: The information phase, agreement phase and settlement phase which was an improvement on the reference model developed for e-marketplaces in [29]. ...
The evolution of marketplaces started from the traditional market�place, the internet marketplace, the web service marketplace, the grid
marketplace, before moving to cloud e-marketplace. The need to have
rapid access to various service by different customers brought about
cloud e-marketplaces. The goal of the cloud e-marketplace is to at�tract the biggest possible number of buyers while ensuring a reduced
waiting time for customers and maximized profit for cloud service
providers. Challenges like security, performance and fault tolerance
are of great concern in the cloud market. While discussion on the is�sue of security and performance are ongoing, that of fault tolerance is
yet to be fully addressed. Although some researchers have proposed
the use of multiple servers in achieving the main idea of the cloud
e-marketplace, different kinds of faults still affects the performance of
cloud e-market. Balancing of providers’ cost and customers’ waiting
time is still a major concern. Various techniques have been proposed
in solving these problems. However, these techniques only work in a
static environment where these servers can be faulty which may lead
to long waiting time. We propose the use of Raft consensus protocol
as our fault tolerant approach. We use the dynamic environment as
against the already static approached already discussed in the liter�ature. In the dynamic environment, two fault tolerant centers that are
capable of surviving failure caused by server overload or congestion
are used. These are primary and the reservoir centers. The Raft Con�sensus Protocol is used in both centers to coordinate the servers and
make sure that each of the servers exist either as the leader, a candi�date, or a as a follower. A waiting time counter algorithm is developed
that directs customers request to the primary center when waiting time
t<N, and to the reservoir center when waiting time t≥N. We set up our
consumer arrival time, the service time is recorded and our N is set to
5 sec. Furthermore, the result of this research when compared to ex�isting system using various performance metrics showed that the de�veloped mechanism allowed optimal performance in the servers used
for cloud e-marketplaces’ service delivery, thereby causing reduced
waiting time and increased profit.
... Emerging technologies (ETs) and communication systems are credited with improving the connectivity of SMMEs to their customer base, enhancing online interactivity and availing latest information about markets, allowing SMMEs to compete successfully (Broekemier, Chau and Seshandri, 2015). As such, ETs form the staple communication and deliberative platforms for SMMEs striving to extend their geographical reach of customers and breaching the unfamiliarity of their brands to the outside stakeholders (Giovanoli, Pulikal and Grivas, 2014). Despite the potential negative consequences associated with online marketing (e.g. ...
... Social media sites as e-marketplace platforms An e-marketplace is a virtual online platform where traders can transact from any part of the world (Mola and Russo, 2016). E-marketplace platforms facilitate online business transactions between sellers and buyers as they act as middlemen who allow traders to transact (Giovanoli et al., 2014). In developed countries, e-marketplaces are fast replacing the traditional market spaces as they allow consumers to share experiences, products and information online (Li, Fang, Wang, Lim and Liang, 2015;Alali et al., 2016). ...
... In developed countries, e-marketplaces are fast replacing the traditional market spaces as they allow consumers to share experiences, products and information online (Li, Fang, Wang, Lim and Liang, 2015;Alali et al., 2016). They also match buyers and seller's needs, enhance trade and information exchange while providing support infrastructure for online transactions (Alali et al., 2016;Giovanoli et al., 2014). Social media platforms allow customers to visit their sites and SMMEs employ them as emarketplace platforms for posting advertisements, selling products and presenting business profiles, and building relationships with customers on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google and others (Malaba, 2015). ...
This study explores the significance of social media as e-marketplaces for advancing e-commerce for small scale, micro and medium enterprises (SMMEs) in the southern African sub-region-notably in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Evidence from the examination of extant literature and our personal observations reveal that when properly harnessed as e-marketplaces, social media platforms, especially those that are compatible with mobile devices (i.e. smart mobile phones, tablets and notebooks), have tremendous e-commerce potential to enhance brand awareness, market growth, and market share for firms, thereby augmenting and expediting the management of customer relationships and brand loyalty. These benefits have the potential to trigger innovative marketing, brand positioning and creativity for SMMEs in South Africa and Zimbabwe. The main theoretical contribution of this study is the development of a conceptual model of social media that promotes SMME growth especially considering the large percentage of youth with a large appetite for new technology. Therefore, active engagement on social media could breach (the current) location silos," by tapping into the diaspora market.
How to cite:
Rambe, P., Matema, S. C., & Madichie, N. O. (2017). Breaching Location Silos: An Exploration of social media optimisation by SMMEs in Southern Africa. LSBM Working Paper Series, Vol. 2, Issue 2/3, pp. 43-59. (ISSN 2632-2994)
... This research will attempt to approach these challenges by designing a good fault tolerant control mechanism using raft consensus protocol in a typical cloud e-marketplace. This research is closely related the work of [16] and [17]. What differentiates this work are: ...
... The Raft algorithm which is an improvement on the paxos algorithm in [57] was developed by Ongaro in [17]. Although the most widely used consensus protocol is the Paxos algorithm and it has been the subject of various researches as seen in [58], [59], [60] [58]. ...
... Raft consensus protocol according to [17], is also more suitable than other consensus algorithms for real-world implementations, it performs well enough for practical deployments, and it addresses all aspects of building a complete system. ...
The evolution of marketplaces started from the traditional marketplace, the internet marketplace, the web service marketplace, the grid marketplace, before moving to cloud e-marketplace. The goal of the cloud e-marketplace is to attract the biggest possible number of buyers while ensuring a reduced waiting time for customers and maximized profit for cloud service providers. Challenges like security, performance and fault tolerance are of great concern in the cloud market. While discussion on the issue of security and performance are ongoing, that of fault tolerance is yet to be fully addressed. Although some researchers have proposed the use of multiple servers in achieving the main idea of the cloud e-marketplace, different kinds of faults still affects the performance of cloud e-market. Balancing of providers’ cost and customers’ waiting time is still a major concern. Various techniques have been proposed in solving these problems. However, these techniques only work in a static environment where these servers can be faulty which may lead to long waiting time. We propose the use of Raft consensus protocol as our fault tolerant approach. We use the dynamic environment as against the already static approaches already discussed in literature. In the dynamic environment, two fault tolerant centers that are capable of surviving failure caused by server overload or congestion are used. These are primary and the reservoir centers. The Raft Consensus Protocol is used in both centers to coordinate the servers and make sure that each of the servers exist either as the leader, a candidate, or a as a follower. A waiting time counter is used to direct customers’ request to the primary center when waiting time < N, and to the reservoir center when waiting time > N. We set up our consumer arrival time, the service time is recorded and our N is set to 5 sec. Furthermore, the result of this research when compared to existing system using various performance metrics showed that the developed mechanism allowed optimal performance in the servers used for cloud e-marketplaces’ service delivery, thereby causing reduced waiting time and increased profit.
... E-marketplace is the virtual environment for buying and selling of services [1]. Various literatures have tried to give the best definition to the emarketplace, example is in [2], where it was defined as an online market environment over the internet where both sellers and buyers act as market players to exchange goods and services. The authors in [3] defined a marketplace as an area of exchange in which many buyers and vendors meet in order to conduct business transactions, and stated that a key difference exist between e-marketplaces in traditional e-commerce situations in which many buyers negotiate with one vendor, and eprocurement situations in which one buyer negotiates with many vendors. ...
... There are three main functions of a marketplace according to [2] and they are listed as: (i) Matching of buyers and sellers (ii) Facilitating the exchange of information, goods, services, and associated (iii) ...
... 1. Independent E-marketplace 2. Buyer oriented E-marketplaces 3. Supplier-oriented E-Marketplace 4. Vertical and Horizontal E-marketplaces The authors in [2], developed a Reference model for e-marketplaces that defines three phases: the information phase, agreement phase and settlement phase; which is a relative improvement on the reference model developed for e-marketplaces in [8]. The benefits of e-marketplace was explicitly differentiated between Buyers and consumers in [7]. ...
The need to have rapid access to various service by various customers brought about the introduction of cloud e-marketplaces. The goal of the cloud e-marketplace is to attract the biggest possible number of buyers and also ensure that the quality of the delivered services is sustained. Even though various literatures exist on cloud oriented marketplace, most of these literatures are short of some important details. This review paper provides a better literature on cloud oriented e-marketplaces by discussing the evolution, features, existing research, challenges and in addition, concluded that the future approach that will allow optimized performance in cloud e-marketplaces’ would be to consider the servers being used for cloud service delivery as a group of distributed systems.
... Those services may be of the same type; however, inevitable variabilities are expected in terms of price, quality, capabilities, availability, and other relevant factors. In the domain of cloud computing, the processes of service discovery, composition, and matching are typically conducted by CSB (Cloud Services Brokerage) mechanisms [8]. However, the complex nature of cloud-based manufacturing in terms of the variety of services, capabilities, and requirements as well as the autonomy of providers and users calls for the formation of a new kind of cross-platform marketplace [35,36]. ...
The future of manufacturing depends on the successful implementation of two terms: cyber-physical systems (CPS) and micro-services. CPS technologies are transforming the way manufacturing components interact, just as the Internet has transformed the interaction with information. A micro-service is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of loosely-coupled, independent, and self-executable programs that can be composed to provide various capabilities of large, monolithic manufacturing applications such as ERP and MES. The transition to such a modular structure enables two important features. First, micro-services can be sourced on a pay-as-you-go fashion from a large, diverse, and growing number of independent providers, thus opening the manufacturing space to new players such as innovative and agile startups. Second, those micro-services can be viewed as building-blocks for creating on-demand, complex, custom processes that address the specific needs of users. Taken together, micro-services, the platforms on which they reside, and service vendors constitute a multi-platform marketplace. This article first provides an overview of new manufacturing paradigms enabled by CPS and micro-services. It then formalizes the multi-platform marketplaces for micro-services as multi-layer networks of collaborating-competing agents with different interests, policies, capabilities, and technologies. It finally formulates a research methodology for optimizing the policies and interactions through the theories of matching markets and multi-agent reinforcement learning.
... Applicability: The MRM has been successfully applied in many different domains (e.g., m-commerce [30], collaborative networks [31], service systems [32], enterprise mashup environments [33], and marketplaces for cloud services [34]. Regarding its applicability in the context of this work, the MRM is considered suitable to be leveraged as the theoretical framework for the development of a new reference model. ...
The platform economy denotes a subset of economic activities enabled by platforms such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Uber. Due to their tremendous success, more and more offerings concentrate around platforms increasing platforms’ positional-power, hence leading towards a de-facto centralization of previously decentralized online markets. Furthermore, platform models work well for individual products and services or predefined combinations of these. However, they fall short in supporting complex products (personalized combinations of individual products and services), the combination of which is required to fulfill a particular consumer need, consequently increasing transaction costs for consumers looking for such products. To address these issues, we envision a “post-platform economy”—an economy facilitated by decentralized and self-organized online structures named Distributed Market Spaces. This work proposes a comprehensive model to serve as a guiding framework for the analysis, design, and implementation of Distributed Market Spaces. The proposed model leverages the St. Gallen Media Reference Model by adjusting existing and adding new entities and elements. The resulting multidimensional and multi-view model defines how a reference Distributed Market Space (a) works on the strategic and operational levels, (b) enables market exchange for complex products, and (c) how its instances might unfold during different life stages. In a case study, we demonstrated the application of our model and evaluated its suitability of meeting the primary objectives it was designed for.
... Existing research on platform architectures focuses merely on facilitating specific phases of service development or service consumption. Platforms for service provisioning include Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketplaces (Giovanoli, Pulikal, and Grivas 2014) or service directories (Maximilien, Ranabahu, and Gomadam 2008). Another category of platforms is dedicated to the integration of services. ...
Current e-commerce architectures rely on a small number of monolithic application systems. The adoption of innovative IT functionality within these architectures is a tedious and complex task. The purpose of this paper is to present a design for a novel platform architecture to improve the pluggability of e-commerce services. More precisely, the pluggability of services in current architectures is described, a platform architecture is introduced, and its effect on pluggability is evaluated by means of a prototype. The enablers for this architecture are the recent innovations of web programming interfaces, delegated resource access, and client-side web application frameworks. Those technologies are common in social media and their potential in enterprise computing is revealed in this work, based on the example of a trade compliance service for cross-border retail. The results of this study suggest that the architectural design has merits as it improves the pluggability of e-commerce services. Hence, e-commerce companies should consider a paradigm shift and move from using self-contained application components to a platform-based adoption of complementary services.
... From an architectural perspective, including reputation information in the OTF computing process has been discussed in [3]. Intermediaries selling composed services are also analyzed in the literature on Cloud Services Brokerage as for example in [8,10,17]. We complement previous works by considering contract design issues from an economic perspective. ...
In this paper, we study markets in which sellers and buyers interact with each other via an intermediary. Our motivating example is a market with a cloud infrastructure where single services are flexibly combined to composed services. We address the contract design problem of an intermediary to purchase complementary single services. By using a non-cooperative game-theoretic model, we analyze the incentives for high- and low-quality composed services to be an equilibrium outcome of the market. It turns out that equilibria with low quality can be obtained in the short run and in the long run, whereas those with high quality can only be achieved in the long run. In our analysis we explicitly determine the according discount factors needed in an infinitely repeated game. Furthermore, we derive optimal contracts for the supply of high- and low-quality composed services.
The objective of this chapter is to introduce the basics of cloud governance, management and brokerage.
The E-commerce trends are showing a growing rate in the last decade for both B to B and B to C trade. The e-commerce technologies enable firms to collect a huge amount of data regarding the profile of consumers, the habits of consumption, the frequency and amounts of purchases, the payment details, the level of satisfaction and also the intention to repurchase the product or equivalent products in the future. The e-commerce technol-ogies are then helping managers to collect relevant data and orient strategic and tactical marketing decisions. The problem that faces small and medium enterprises nowadays is the lack of customer information analysis capabilities that treat the large, heterogeneous and volatile aspects of the data collected with the e-commerce tools. This paper proposes a survey of the main e-commerce technologies and tools that collect consumer data and the potential contribution of each type of data in generating relevant customer knowledge that orient the marketing decisions. This research highlights all the stages of the process from the e-commerce technologies that collect data, then the analytical phase for the ex-traction of knowledge and finally the marketing decision orientation.
The objective of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the basics of cloud service brokerage (CSB). By the end of this chapter the reader should have a fair understanding of CSB, the reasons enterprises need CSB, its typical capabilities, and architecture.
Cloud Service Brokerage systems are still in an early stage and mostly do not satisfy the existing demand of Cloud Consumers and Cloud Providers. An important aspect of Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB) Systems is to locate services as per the requirements of a Cloud Consumer. In the wide and varied world of Cloud Services, every single service varies according to technical aspects, specifications, limitations and much more. Locating a suitable service means the consumer needs to compare various services, know all specifications related to his service and make a choice. The next generation of Cloud Service Brokerage systems will be expected to make it easier to make choices and comparison. In this paper we propose improvements on the process of finding a service within the Cloud Brokering Systems by using an innovative approach towards profiling the IT and Cloud services of an Enterprise Customer.
The recent development in Cloud computing has enabled the realization of delivering computing as an utility. Many industries
such as Amazon and Google have started offering Cloud services on a “pay as you go” basis. These advances have led to the
evolution of the market infrastructure in the form of a Market Exchange (ME) that facilitates the trading between consumers
and Cloud providers. Such market environment eases the trading process by aggregating IT services from a variety of sources,
and allows consumers to easily select them. In this paper, we propose a light weight and platform independent ME framework
called “Mandi”, which allows consumers and providers to trade computing resources according to their requirements. The novelty
of Mandi is that it not only gives its users the flexibility in terms of negotiation protocol, but also allows the simultaneous
coexistence of multiple trading negotiations. In this paper, we first present the requirements that motivated our design and
discuss how these facilitate the trading of compute resources using multiple market models (also called negotiation protocols).
Finally, we evaluate the performance of the first prototype of “Mandi” in terms of its scalability.
KeywordsCloud computing–Utility computing–Market exchange–Market model
This keynote paper: (1) presents the 21st century vision of computing and identifies various IT paradigms promising to deliver computing as a utility; (2) defines the architecture for creating market-oriented Clouds and computing atmosphere by leveraging technologies such as virtual machines; (3) provides thoughts on market-based resource management strategies that encompass both customer-driven service management and computational risk management to sustain SLA-oriented resource allocation; (4) presents the work carried out as part of our new Cloud Computing initiative, called Cloudbus: (i) Aneka, a Platform as a Service software system containing SDK (Software Development Kit) for construction of Cloud applications and deployment on private or public Clouds, in addition to supporting market-oriented resource management; (ii) internetworking of Clouds for dynamic creation of federated computing environments for scaling of elastic applications; (iii) creation of 3rd party Cloud brokering services for building content delivery networks and e-Science applications and their deployment on capabilities of IaaS providers such as Amazon along with Grid mashups; (iv) CloudSim supporting modelling and simulation of Clouds for performance studies; (v) Energy Efficient Resource Allocation Mechanisms and Techniques for creation and management of Green Clouds; and (vi) pathways for future research. Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, Conference paper
The expanding Cloud computing services offer great opportunities for consumers to find the best service and best pricing, which however raises new challenges on how to select the best service out of the huge pool. It is time-consuming for consumers to collect the necessary information and analyze all service providers to make the decision. This is also a highly demanding task from a computational perspective, because the same computations may be conducted repeatedly by multiple consumers who have similar requirements. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel brokerage-based architecture in the Cloud, where the Cloud brokers is responsible for the service selection. In particular, we design a unique indexing technique for managing the information of a large number of Cloud service providers. We then develop efficient service selection algorithms that rank potential service providers and aggregate them if necessary. We prove the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach through an experimental study with the real and synthetic Cloud data.
The marketplace, as it has evolved historically, is an institution that allows customers and suppliers to meet at a certain place and a certain time in order to announce buying or selling intentions which may eventually match and be settled. The evolution of communication technologies has weakened time and space restrictions. Electronic markets represent the next step in the evolution of the marketplace. They are emerging in different fields, supporting the exchange of goods and services of different types, with different types of actors, and following different architectural principles. This paper provides a framework for the modeling of specific telematics-supported market platforms for the coordination of the exchange processes among market participants.
Abstract Recently, ontologies have been developed in various business domains with the recent maturing of the Semantic Web technologies. However, ontology-related researches have largely focused on the facilitation of successful matchmaking but not much on traders’ requirement elicitation and potential negotiations in e-marketplaces. Because ontology provides the key knowledge about the inter-relationships among the issues and alternatives of the traders’ requirements, we show how to elicit trade requirements, alternatives, and tradeoff from an agreed ontology. This facilitates the whole business process of the e-marketplace, from matchmaking, recommendation, tonegotiation. We further propose a novel methodology for the elicitation of dependencies among traders’ requirements for the formulation of an effective decision plan. As a result, traders can have a better cognition of their requirements and the overall operationsof the e-marketplace can be streamlined. Keywords: e-marketplace, semantics, ontology, matchmaking, recommendation, negotiation. 1,INTRODUCTION Recently, Semantic Web technologies (Fensel et al. 2001, Daconta et al. 2003) have been maturing to
Throughout history, markets have always re-created themselves, shifting the economic fortunes of those present at the creation. In this paper we discover how e-commerce alters the dimensions of time, place and form to alter fundamental notions of what a market is and how it operates. We explain what the shift from marketplaces to marketspaces means - and, what it portends. We look at new forms of intermediaries, cybermediaries. We explore the need for companies to appear in multiple, simultaneous roles in multiple, simultaneous marketspaces. Then we drill deeper to look at the business case for I-markets, their inter-enterprise business processes and the agile software needed to support new and changing business models. Armed with this framework, we move on to describe the key dimensions of strategy that companies will need in order to succeed as 21st century markets transform from places to spaces.
The contribution of market structure to the success of an electronic marketplace (e-marketplace) is an issue that has not received a great deal of attention in the literature. Although, researchers have given some attention to the antecedents of successful e-marketplace participation by organizations,there has been relatively little attention given to the e-marketplace structures. In this paper, the issue of e-marketplace strategy and its relationship withe-marketplace structure is examined. A classification of e-marketplace strategies is presented. The market structures of intermediary, hierarchy, consortium,and large group ownership structures are mapped onto this classification using four case studies to explain the relationship between structure and strategy. Each structural model has a range of implications for market participants. These include the economic and service benefits from intermediaries, economic benefits, and the potential to deliver improved levels of service for hierarchies,the relational benefits from the strong network ethos of consortia, and large group ownership structures which have potential for regional community or industry sector development.
Computing is often viewed as a tool and a computing system is
typically treated as a toolbox of applications for performing operations
such as calculations and data storage and transfer. Currently, humans
develop these application tools and apply, or specify how to apply,
them. Recognizing that computing is a fundamental discipline challenges
us to accept the notion that a computing system could play other roles
than merely serving as a toolbox. An active player will require massive
parallelism and mechanisms for abstracting over interactions
With the Internet providing a powerful low cost medium for businesses to advertise and communicate information about their product and service offers, there is tremendous opportunity for intermediaries to help create efficient markets for businesses to conduct commerce smoothly and securely over the Internet, and in the process derive profit. Among these intermediaries, the role of Electronic Marketplaces is becoming far more important than ever to bring together buyers, sellers and others to facilitate commerce transactions. We envision that different flavors of E-Marketplaces will evolve in the coming years, some community based, some profit based and some created by cooperating firms or businesses. In this paper, we consider the role of profit oriented E-marketplaces. In particular we consider a specific E-Marketplace for computational resources such as bandwidth, and we draw some insights into the architectural requirements and objectives of such intermediaries. In our ...
Three types of Cloud Brokerage will enhance Cloud Services
- Gartner Inc
Gartner Inc., " Three types of Cloud Brokerage will enhance Cloud
Services ", Gartner Incorporate, Stamford: 2009.
The Open Archival Information System: A Model for Preserving Digital Information
- D Sawyer
- L Reich
D. Sawyer and L. Reich, " The Open Archival Information System: A
Model for Preserving Digital Information ", 2003, Tutorial
Presentation: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA).
The Worlds first vendor neutral Marketplace for IaaS resources
- Deutsche Börse
- Cloud Exchange
- S Zilch
- Factsheet
Deutsche Börse Cloud Exchange, Zilch S., Factsheet " The Worlds
first vendor neutral Marketplace for IaaS resources ",
http://dbcloudexchange.com/media/20140217_DBCE_Factsheet_engl
ish.pdf. 17.02.2014.
[16] A.
Mauro,
" Jamcracker
Cloud
Broker
Enabler ",
http://vinfrastructure.it/2013/08/jamcracker-cloud-broker-enabler/.
01.08.2013.
Cloud Services Brokerage Is Dominated by Three Primary Roles
- C D Plummer
C. D. Plummer et al., " Cloud Services Brokerage Is Dominated by
Three Primary Roles ", Gartner, November 2011.