Making the cloud work for software producers: Linking architecture, operating cost and revenue

Cloud migration is concerned with moving an on-premise software system into the cloud. In this paper, we focus on software producers adopting the cloud to provide their solutions to enterprise customers. Their challenge is to migrate a software product, developed in-house and traditionally delivered on-premise, to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Platform-as-a-Service solution, while also mapping an existing traditional licensing model on to a cloud monetization model. The analysis of relevant cost types and factors of cloud computing generate relevant information for the software producers when deciding to adopt cloud computing, and defining software pricing. We present an integrated framework for informing cloud monetization based on operational cost factors for migrating to the cloud and test it in a real-life case study. Differences between basic virtualization of the software product and using fully cloud-native platform services for re-architecting the product in question are discussed.