Total Cost of Service Life - Decision Support for Selecting and Orchestrating Services

Becker Jörg, Beverungen Daniel, Matzner Martin, Müller Oliver

Zusammenfassung
Business services as well as information services (such as web services) can be described and discovered by means of their functional and non-functional properties. An important non-functional property is the price associated with consuming a service. On electronic marketplaces, evaluating the price of utilizing a service is often difficult due to a huge variety of existing pricing models and deliberately intransparent conditions of use. Even so, a sound evaluation of the total cost associated with a service is beneficial for a service consumer, especially in scenarios of long-term utilization of the service or if orchestrating services provided by different sellers. Theory and practice so far lacks methods that can sufficiently guide decisions related to selecting services based on cost data. This paper strives to present such a method based on the TCO concept and on insights from capital budgeting and investment theory. The method supports service customers in comparing the costs associated with several functionally similar services, in selecting services, and finally in evaluating the costs associated with entire service orchestrations.

Schlüsselwörter
Information services; Electronic marketplace; Service selection; Service orchestration; Cost calculation