Matching the business perspectives of providers and customers in future cloud markets

To date a few, big providers dominate the market of Cloud resources. They provide proprietary solutions through inflexible pricing and SLA schemes. On the research side, the community is working to define specifications and standards on several aspects of the cloud technology. When standards will get mature, interoperability among clouds will be a reality. Customers will be no more locked-up to any proprietary technology and new players will have the chance to enter the market. The competition challenge will be played on the real capability of providers to accommodate customers’ requests in a flexible way and to supply high and differentiated QoS levels. In this market scenario a mechanism must be devised to support the matchmaking between what providers offer and what customers’ applications demand. In this work we propose the definition of a semantic model that helps customers and providers to characterize their demands/offers, and provide semantic tools performing the matchmaking in such a way to maximize both the provider’s profit and the customer’s utility. The proposal has been validated by running tests on a software prototype of the discovery framework.