E-Procurement of Cloud-based Information Systems – a Product-Service System Approach

The way of providing information systems for companies changes dramatically. Topics like cloud computing serve as a promoter for the replacement of traditional monolithic business applications towards distributed and orchestrated application landscapes. This leads to new challenges in the development and provisioning of information systems. The question is now how to purchase appropriate application components, which may be integrated into an application landscape, rather than how to develop an information system from scratch. This leads to a shift in paying more attention to an appropriate procurement process of application components rather than to software development. This paper answers this issue by providing a sophisticated procurement process for cloud-based information systems by adapting a reference model for the procurement of product-service systems. Based on this procurement model, IT providers may provide solutions with higher complexity and better customer demand alignment to gain competitive advantage in a growing and dynamic market segment