Success-Driving Business Model Characteristics of IaaS Providers – Towards a Quantitative Evaluation

Abstract

Despite the highly competitive situation within the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market and the resulting pressure and uncertainty for the involved providers, only little knowledge is available about business model characteristics (BMCs) related to success. Merely few qualitative studies are existing that propose hypotheses on success-driving business model characteristics (SDBMCs), however, a general and comparative quantitative evaluation and thus an evidence for their impact on business success is still missing. But this knowledge is essential for IaaS providers as it would allow them to focus their limited resources and efforts on the truly decisive BMCs and, at the same time, save costs by avoiding activities and investments of minor importance. Aiming to reduce this gap, a web-based survey was carried out, in which representatives of IaaS providers of different size rated the level of relevance of the proposed SDBMCs. As this study is still going on, this paper focuses on presenting the study design and an analysis of the data collected so far. As a preliminary result, nearly 80 % of the SDBMCs were rated as extremely important or important, meaning that the existing qualitative research results were confirmed to a high degree. The relevance of the individual SDBMCs varies greatly depending on the IaaS provider’s size