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ability of Cloud Computing to the African market the
variable pricing system need be incorporated deeply
into Cloud Computing. African buyers enjoy a feel of
personalize pricing.
6 INTEGRATION INTO CloudIA
CloudIA (Sulistio et al., 2009) is a private cloud es-
tablished by HFU to harness the potentials of Cloud
Computing for its internal usage and also for Small
and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The CloudIA ar-
chitecture is based on OpenNebula with extra mod-
ules for monitoring, QoS, etc., and special security
issues. It has layers: the Business, the System and the
Resource layers. The proposed Utility Price Model
is incorporated into the Business Layer of CloudIA.
As shown in Fig. 1 a customer can access the Utility
Price Module through the GUI Interface to specify the
price model individually. The boundaries (min/max
values) are stored in the Business Templates which
have to be maintained by the provider for groups of
customers (e.g. well known customers, first-use cus-
tomers, etc.) The Accounting module, which collects
from the Cloud API (e.g. no of running instances)
Open Nebula Database (e.g. history data), and from
the Cloud Resources itself (e.g. no. of SaaS users).
Figure 1: Architecture of the Cloud Utility Model.
7 CONCLUSIONS
Negotiation in form of give-and-take compromise is
an essential feature of the African Business; this made
static pricing unattractive to a typical African. Cus-
tomizing Cloud offerings for African involves embel-
lishment of the pricing scheme with negotiation that
allows the buyer to personalize pricing. This study
proposed price models that accommodates variable
pricing, hence attractive to the African markets. It
gives the customers the flexibility of choosing a us-
age style accompanied by a flexible pricing as well.
The customer can get better prices if the usage of the
Cloud services are predicted and therefore allows the
Cloud provider to improve its planning and therefore
improve the utilization of the Cloud infrastructure.
Effort is ongoing to develop mathematical models for
the price models and afterwards employs appropriate
simulations to validate the models.
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