Towards delivering analytical solutions in cloud: Business models and technical challenges

Analytical Solutions increasingly play a key role in the modern enterprise business. Currently, such solutions are usually very costly for customer to consume, as the deployment cost is high due to high performance hardware requirement and complex software configuration. Moreover, such on-premises solutions are not suitable for the occasional analytics consumers. On the other hand, Analytical solutions are also hard for solution providers to deliver cost efficient service, since the cost is high in initial customer engagement as well as conducting incremental service. To deliver analytical solutions in a cost-effective way, we propose the idea of "analytical cloud", which is designed to provide on-demand decision support, analytical capabilities, and computational resources in a manageable cloud environment. In this paper, we summarize the potential business models supported by this new delivery model and identify the technical issues required to be addressed in such business models. © 2011 IEEE.