Value Facilitation as Antecedent of Service Provider Profitability

The cloud service market has seen a tremendous growth in recent years. Consequently, more and more service providers have entered this dynamic market, turning it into one of the most competitive markets in modern IT industry. With the market becoming mature, providers that focused on growth strategies in the past, however, need to shift their attention to profitability now. Based on a qualitative study with 14 cloud service experts, the authors explore the relationship between cloud service provider profitability and value facilitation, i.e., the capability to build up resources in advance of future customer engagements. The authors' results indicate a positive relationship between cloud service profitability and value facilitation, which gives valuable insights for both researcher and practitioners and how to design cloud service offerings.

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