As Clouds mature and become ubiquitous, marketplace environments are developed facilitating the provision of services in a manner that emphasizes on the modular composition of individual services across different providers that crosscut the cloud service stack layers (i.e. composition of XaaS) to fulfil customers' requirements. Besides acting as intermediaries for the search, selection and trading of services, such marketplaces should also support the complete service lifecycle and the consolidation of offerings from different providers with varying and often contradicting business goals. In this paper we present a one-stop cloud marketplace solution that addresses the aforementioned challenges while enabling the simulation of different business cases to optimize service offerings according to a wide and dynamic set of parameters. Moreover, the proposed solution introduces advanced aggregated price models and integrates a new resolution approach that incorporates business intelligence into the search and selection processes. We also demonstrate the operation of the implemented approach and evaluate its effectiveness using a real-world scenario, based on a taxi fleet management application. -->http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167739X14000454

The 4CaaSt project aims at developing a PaaS, framework that enables flexible definition, marketing,, deployment and management of Cloud-based services and, applications. The major innovations proposed by 4CaaSt are, the blueprint and its lifecycle management, a one stop shop for, Cloud services and a PaaS level resource management, featuring elasticity. 4CaaSt also provides a portfolio of ready to, use Cloud native services and Cloud-aware immigrant, technologies.

The value returned by Enterprise Architecture (EA) is being viewed with increasing consideration by researchers and practitioners. They struggle to justify the EA investments made. Quantifying the Enterprise Architecture benefits has always been a challenge because measurements and real value delivered can not often be expressed in simple technical oriented metrics only.In this paper we suggest a multi-perspective framework, based on the concept of Balanced Scorecard (BSC), for providing guidance about where to identify and quantify the value of EA from the perspective of management. A derived methodology is used to localize a few selected Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) for measuring the benefits of Enterprise Architecture that help practitioners to design and implement the suggested framework.

The value returned by Enterprise Architecture (EA) is being viewed with increasing consideration by researchers and practitioners. They struggle to justify the EA investments made. Quantifying the Enterprise Architecture benefits has always been a challenge because measurements and real value delivered can not often be expressed in simple technical oriented metrics only.In this paper we suggest a multi-perspective framework, based on the concept of Balanced Scorecard (BSC), for providing guidance about where to identify and quantify the value of EA from the perspective of management. A derived methodology is used to localize a few selected Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) for measuring the benefits of Enterprise Architecture that help practitioners to design and implement the suggested framework.

Due to the lack of research at the intersection of IT and behavioral health economics we investigate results-based incentives for health promotion in organizations by questioning (1) whether and why employees accept them, (2) which functional affordances of IT enable their implementation and, finally, (3) whether they have positive effects on the health promotion behavior of employees. The current presentation addresses the first two research questions and describes a first build-and-evaluate cycle according to design-science research methodology. For that purpose, the delay of gratification framework is used as justificatory knowledge to inform the design of results-based incentive models for health promotion in organizations (RIMHPO) and their enabling IT artifacts. In a second step, an empirical study was conducted to assess one particular RIMHPO-based program and to gather further feedback on the design principles. The expected results of the current work are finally discussed with regard to policy implications.

The increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies, often referred to as the "Internet of Things" (IoT), offers a wealth of new services and business model opportunities across an ecosystem of partners - and so it forces companies to rethink their current business models. To date, literature does yet not provide actionable, field-tested model theories for capturing, visualizing and analyzing firms' business models in digitally intensive business environments. The present paper (research in progress) therefore addresses the need for a business model type for the Internet of Things, which recognizes the affordances and impacts of digitization in order to allow companies to truly tap into new business model opportunities. We describe the design and evaluation of a type model, which enables researchers and practitioners alike to capture, visualize and analyze firms' current and future business models in IoT in a structured and actionable way. For our study we elected an iterative design science research approach, which prioritizes the utility of prototype artifacts. We feel confident of reaching at an empirically tested business model type, drawn from both Strategic Management and Information Systems research.