GECON - Grid Economics and Business Models Cloud computing is seen by many people as the
natural evolution of Grid computing concepts. Both for instance rely on the use of
service-based approaches for pro- sioning compute and data resources. The importance of
understanding business m- els and the economics of distributed computing systems and services
has generally remained unchanged in the move to Cloud computing. This understanding is nec-
sary in order to build sustainable e-infrastructure and businesses around this paradigm of
sharing Cloud services. Currently only a handful of companies have created s- cessful
businesses around Cloud services. Among these Amazon and Salesforce (with their offerings of
Elastic Compute Cloud and force. com among other offerings) are the most prominent. Both
companies understand how to charge for their services and how to enable commercial transactions
on them. However whether a wide-spread adoption of Cloud services will occur has to seen. One
key enabler remains the ability to support suitable business models and charging schemes that
appeal to users o- sourcing (part of) their internal business functions. The topics that have
been addressed by the authors of accepted papers reflect the above-described situation and the
need for a better understanding of Grid economics. The topics range from market mechanisms for
trading computing resources capacity planning tools for modeling economic aspects of
service-oriented systems archit- tures for handling service level agreements to models for
economically efficient resource allocation.
