Understanding Service Variability for Profitable Software as a Service: Service Providers' Perspective

The number of tenants that subscribe to and pay for a service, and the cost of the SaaS computing infrastructure are the main factors that drive service profitability. In many application domains tenants’ requirements for service vary. Service variability is the degree of the actual variability provided by the Service Provider over the variability required by the tenants for the service. With growing number of tenants, the likelihood of facing more diverse tenants’ requirements increases. We conducted a study of how choices regarding service architecture affect service variability and the cost of supporting a service. We identified positive and negative impacts of service architectural choices on service variability and on Service Provider’s costs. We illustrated how the knowledge of those impacts can help Service Providers analyze service profitability based on different service architecture models, leading to more-informed decisions regarding adoption of SaaS.