Cloud Services is one of the fastest growing market segments. Be it SaaS, PaaS or IaaS, cloud solutions are offering a lucrative opportunity for growth and innovation. But, is innovation, just in the cloud service enough for customer satisfaction and retention? The answer to this question is NO. For, consistent growth, innovation in other aspects of the cloud business is also required. One of these aspects is the billing and pricing model.
Currently, many pricing models are there in existence, such as, Freemium, flat rate, subscriptions, perpetual , multi-tier packages based on functionality, per user per click and CPU power / storage used etc. And the billing models are in the form of monthly, quarterly, annual, pay as you go and pay for what you use models.
But, what these models lack is flexibility, especially in SaaS segment. This is because cloud vendors do not want to change their cash flow models from a big full pie at a time to pieces of the pie in installments i.e. by taking customer payments from fully up front license bills to smaller usage bills split down to monthly fees. Also, in flexible cloud billing and delivery, there are a lot of complexities involved like in telecom billing.
There is a need for innovation in this segment as this is what the customers desire. This need has been identified and successfully catered to by Kahootz, a British cloud collaboration vendor. More such initiatives, leading to greater transparency and comparability will be the future of cloud pricing and billing in years to come.
To know more, please read the following article by Ian Moyse, Board Member, Eurocloud UK and Governance Board Member, Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), at business2community.com:
http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/cloud-promised-world-utility-billing-01221718