Commercial Dependency between Software Service Providers: Concept, Types, and Representation

1. Commercial Dependency between Software Service Providers:Concept, Types, and Representation Orouba Almilaji 2004

2. Outline • Commercial Dependency in SaaS • Causes • Commercial Dependency Types • Commercial Dependency Attributes • Representing Commercial Dependency • Example

3. Commercial Dependency • The freedom to substitute one service for another implies that switching between different service providers is always possible at the time of adaptation. • In reality, switching between different parties in the market or changing the type of the relationships between business partners may not always be flexible. • Those relationships which add difficulties to substitution flexibility are referred to as commercial dependencies.

4. S1 S1 Service of the Depender Service of the Antecedents S2 S2 S2 S3 Arrows represent the CoD between the actors; circles represent the service Commercial Dependency • The essential relationships that are needed between service providers and service users to drive the composition of the service, in which any violation of these relationships will result in a cost.

5. Causes • Availability Factors • Uncertainty, Volatility of the SaaS Market • Legislation and Government Power • Monopoly • Commercial Arrangement (Contractual Agreements)

6. Commercial Dependency Types • Dependency of Contracting Sequentiality • Exclusive Dependency • Hidden Dependency • Compulsory Dependency • Charging Mechanism Dependency • Legal Dependency

7. Commercial Dependency Attributes • Dependency Stability • Transitive Impact • The Cost of Breaching the Dependency

8. Commercial dependency Depender Service a Entity Antecedent Service b Entity Attribute (value) Representing Commercial Dependency Using Conceptual Graphics • How to represent a multi-level view of all the transitive dependencies such that they allow the service actors at the adaptation time to navigate through the dependency hierarchy layers, in order tomake important decision regarding how much it costs to substitute a particular service and whether to switch to another service or not .

9. Pricing service Attributes Attributes CoD CoD Statistical information service Financial advising service Attributes Attributes CoD CoD CoD Attributes National statistics service Monitoring market service Forecasting service Example:

10. Questions and Comments!