Services2Cloud: A Framework for Revenue Analysis of Software-as-a-Service Provisioning

Software as a Service (SaaS) is an increasingly attractive option for delivering software functionality. Software vendors act as service providers provisioning the functionality directly via the Internet, and customers pay for access to the service on a flexible billing model such as subscription or pay-per-use. As a result, the generated revenue is difficult to analyse due to the highly dynamic nature of the customer's interaction with the service. We present the Services2Cloud framework to assist service providers in the analysis of their expected revenue based on customer subscription and service usage. Our approach is based on a formal specification of the service on offer and a concise expression of the service usage as probabilistic patterns which are interpreted as stochastic processes. Key features of our theoretical framework have been implemented within a web-based toolkit that aims to facilitate the revenue analysis process for service providers.

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