A comparative analysis of pricing models for enterprise cloud platforms

Research and commercial efforts are currently addressing challenges and providing solutions in cloud computing. Business models are emerging to address different use case scenarios of cloud computing. In this paper, we present the evaluation of a virtual enterprise (VE)-enabled cloud enterprise architecture for small medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) against EC2 pricing model to prove that our pricing model is more suitable for small medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs). This model is based on the realization that it is not economically viable for SMMEs to acquire their own private cloud infrastructure or even subscribe to public cloud services as a single entity. In our VE-enabled cloud enterprise architecture for SMMEs, temporary co-operations are created to realize the value of a short term business opportunity that the partner SMMEs cannot (or can, but only to a lesser extent) capture on their own. The pricing model obtained from our proposed business model shows the benefits that are derived from using the VE cloud model over subscription to a public cloud as a single business enterprise. The pricing structure of our VE cloud model is up to 17.82 times economical compared to the equivalent Amazon EC2 instance type pricing model.