Acquisition

A financial investment company is launching new investment products to its agents and affiliates. A number of videos have been created to teach the company’s agents and affiliates about the benefits and features of the new products. The videos are very large and need to be available on-demand, so storing them in the cloud lessens the demands on the corporate infrastructure. However, access to those videos needs to be tightly controlled. For competitive reasons, only certi ed company agents should be able to view the videos.

EasyAgriSelling is a small tech start-up in the EU, which developed an online web shop software (as a service) for farmers who would like to start direct-selling their vegetables and other products. Their slogan is: “Selling your agricultural produce to consumers, made easy”. Farmers can set up an online shop in a few clicks - customising their shop with a logo, colours and a description of their farm. EasyAgriSelling operates a pay-as-you-go model, charging no monthly fee, but only charging their customers when products are sold.

A Cloud Service Customer (CSC) uses the services of a Cloud Broker to select the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) that fulfils its specific requirements. The Broker implements a service catalogue encompassing services from multiple CSPs. In addition, the catalogue clearly outlines charges for the various resources that can be provisioned. The CSC makes a selection and the Cloud Broker seamlessly provisions the requested resource from the appropriate CSP through their API or other interface using their native commands.

ConsultLess is a small consultancy firm in the EU that has 20 employees (mostly legal and management experts). One of the employees is partner and also the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the firm. ConsultLess decides to procure office software as a service (SaaS) for use by its employees: the cloud service offers document storage/editing, email and calendar. This cloud service should replace an internal mail-server and o ce software installed on computers.

There are lot of start-ups and SMEs that are active in the Fintech industry (where the financial services meet new technologies and business models) with an operational and business plan to develop and exploit cloud-based services to their customers and end-users. For this, most will consider procuring either IaaS or PaaS from respective Cloud Service Provider (CSPs) that o er these cloud services, which will be used as basis to develop, rely, and exploit their own Platform as a Service (PaaS) respectively Software as a Service (SaaS). This Use Case focusses on a Fintech company procuring Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from major IaaS CSP.