Revenue Streams and Value Propositions of Cloud-Based High Performance Computing in Higher Education

Most higher education institutions can no longer subsidize academic high performance computing (HPC) services the way they used to. New business models are needed. At the same time, Cloud computing has emerged as a new way to digitize the public sector, but thus far there is only little experience in this domain. Therefore, ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich jointly set up a Cloud stack to experiment with HPC service provision and corresponding business model alternatives. On this basis of an interview series, this study aims to foster the understanding of Cloud-based HPC services and revenue streams. The results suggest that service providers appreciate Cloud computing as a means to become more transparent and efficient, i.e. to comply with new public management concepts. However, service consumers can hardly see the need to consume Cloud-based services, because convincing “Cloud-only” applications are still missing. Different revenue streams are discussed.

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