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Analysis of Cloud Business Models for
the Industrial B2B Market Martin W. Krüger* and Marcel Dix ABB Corporate Research Ladenburg, Germany {martin.krueger,
marcel.dix}@de.abb.com
Cloud technology is by today
common in consumer targeted IT markets. In industrial B2B markets however,
cloud technology may provide added value for the customers, but these markets
behave more traditional and conservative compared to B2C markets and are therefore
slower in adapting the new technology. This highlights the need for the
development of appropriate business models accompanying the introduction of
cloud technology to industrial B2B markets. This industrial study introduces
a new framework for the analysis of cloud business models and examines three
B2B cloud business models from a broad range of industries. It was found
first that cloud technology may be very suitable for B2B businesses, as it
poses the opportunity to address multiple roles within a customer
organization at once but with different offerings. Secondly, the examined
cloud business models did not replace existing offerings in the respective
market, but introduced new added value for the customer. Third, the majority
of the B2B cloud offerings could also be solved with a service-client architecture,
but that a ¡°cloud¡± label can support marketing related efforts. This study
builds the basis for deriving common patterns from B2B cloud business models,
which may in the future enable the efficient development of B2B specific
business models for industrial cloud offerings. Keywords: cloud computing, business model innovation, business model analysis, B2B, industrial case study *Corresponding Author: Martin
W. Krüger IT
Convergence Practice (INPRA), Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 12-20, June 2014 [pdf] |