The goal is to set up the foundation of the project, notably by making an overview of the state of the art of cloud computing from a non-technical perspective, and contribute to the establishment of a common ground amongst the partners.
A large portion of the academic literature on Cloud Computing is related to the technical perspective and to a lesser extent to the security perspective. Yet we are observing the development or research on the other dimensions such as business (Marston et al. 2011) or organizational, and that looks at Cloud Computing from a service science perspective. At the European level, Petcu & Vázquez-Poletti (2012) in their book “Research at the European level on Cloud Computing” make an inventory of research projects, finding as of summer 2011, tens of projects about Cloud Computing that are financed by the European Commission in the different actions (collaborative projects, capacity projects, idea projects, innovation projects, etc.). If the technical dimension of these projects remains important, we notice, notably in the case of the more recent projects, that the non-technical dimension in increasingly receiving some attention. Hence, several projects are now also looking at how Cloud Technologies and solutions are situated in the enterprises and in the society, considering how it is used, what are the impacts in the organizations and on the ecosystem, and what are the business models. In the 21st European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2013), that took place in Utrecht, The Netherlands in June 5-8, 2013, we could observe a significant number of papers covering of the different non-technical aspects of Cloud Computing such simulating Cloud business models (Giessmann et al. 2013), reflecting about intermediaries in crowdsourcing business models (Zogaj & Bretschneider, 2013), contract plans profit maximization for Cloud Computing (Schlereth & Kihal 2013), exploring subscription renewal intention (Walther et al. 2013b), the evaluation of operational cloud enterprise system success (Walther et al. 2013), and factors affecting the adoption of cloud computing for enterprises (McGeogh & Donnellan, 2013).
Other literature on the subject includes the classification of Cloud business models (Weinhardt, et al. 2009), cost effectiveness of commercial computing clouds (Brumec & Vrček 2013), the ranking of cloud computing services (Garg, Versteeg, & Buyya 2013), outsourcing business (Motahari-Nezhad, Stephenson, & Singhal 2009).
The methods that are used for addressing these different dimensions are multiple and diverse, such as the elaboration of cases and scenarios as in the case of the 4CaaSt FP7 European project (4CaaSt 2012), or traditional simulation approaches (Giessmann et al. 2013), or the traditional methods used in the Management of Information Systems.
We believe that this multiplicity of methods addressing a particular aspect, that have each of them their own complexity, represent some limits to a more holistic understanding of a domain such as Cloud Computing, for the practitioners (and notably in SMEs that have very limited capability to employ experts), but also for the researchers looking for a global picture of the situation.
