A Case Study for Business Integration as a Service

1. Introduction

Cloud Computing has become a buzz word and hot topic in academia and industry. There is an increasing number of organisations offering Cloud Computing products and services in industry. Amazon is a market leader in Public Cloud Computing and offers Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for computing capacity and Simple Storage Service (S3) for storage capacity. Microsoft provides Windows Azure services to allow developers to store their code and develop new applications for their clients or companies. Salesforce.com is a pioneer in Cloud Computing and offers their Customer Relation Management (CRM) applications to a large number of their users. Oracle offers several products and services ranging from hardware to application services after acquiring Sun Microsystems. IBM has Cloud Computing products and applications suites to help their customers. In addition, there are more Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) developing and selling their Cloud Computing services and products. They offer different types of business models and perspective. Computing Clouds are commonly classified into Public Clouds, Private Clouds and Hybrid Clouds (Ambrust et al., 2009; Ahronovitz et al., 2010; Chang et al., 2010 a; 2010 b; 2010 c; 2012 a; 2012 b; 2013 a; 2013 b; 2013 c). The type of Cloud an organisation adopts will depend on its needs and the volumes and types of services and data they plan to have and use. The examples described above are public clouds. There are researchers describing the design, implementations and user evaluation of private clouds, where Chang et al (2012 a; 2012 b; 2012 c; 2013 a; 2013 b; 2013 c) and Chang (2013 a; 2013 b; 2013 c; 2013 d; 2013 e) demonstrate the effectiveness of their implementations and positive impacts to organisations that adopt Private Clouds, including the technical demonstrations, results, discussions and positive impacts.

Academia also acknowledge the benefits of adopting Cloud Computing, particularly in operational management in scalability of data centre resources, cost saving, improvement in efficiency, green IT and agility to complete tasks (Foster et al; 2008; Amburst et al., 2009; Buyya et al, 2009; Weinhardt et al. 2009; Chang et al., 2011 a; 2011 b; 2011 c; 2012 a; 2012 b; 2012 c; 2013 a; 2013 b). Amburst et al (2009) identified cost reduction in IT services from using Cloud Computing. They also presented their Cloud Computing economics and ten major challenges for Cloud Computing. They emphasise a shift of risk from maintaining data centres and the capital costs of running them to the loss of data while managing Clouds. Buyya et al. (2009) assert that Cloud Computing offers billing-based Service Level Agreements (SLA) which can be used for operational management offering cost-savings and streamlining business activities and processes. Weinhardt et al. (2009) propose the business models for Cloud Computing services. Chang et al. (2011 a; 2011 b; 2011 c; 2011 d; 2012 a; 2012 b; 2012 c; 2013 a; 2013 b; 2013 c) and Chang (2013 a; 2013 b; 2013 c; 2013 d; 2013 e) provide their rationale, analysis and discuss to demonstrated added values offered by Cloud Computing adoption supported by their case studies.