A value proposition oriented typology of electronic marketplaces for B2B SaaS applications

With the increasing dissemination and acceptance of Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) a variety of opportunities as well as challenges and threats arise (Marston et al. 2011). In particular, in order to increase market transparency specific aggregation and brokerage functionalities need to be addressed (Marston et al. 2011; Ried 2011). In practice, several companies have begun to tackle these challenges by developing electronic marketplaces (EMs) as successfully seen in several other industries. Prominent examples of such marketplaces for B2B SaaS services are driven and operated by companies like Deutsche Telekom, Oracle or Salesforce. Besides the potential of defragmenting the SaaS market and reaching SME companies, EMs may offer further beneficial capabilities such as process integration or collaboration among others (Soh et al. 2006; Standing et al. 2010; Weill and Vitale 2001). Furthermore, in the context of development platforms (PaaS) researchers believe that EMs will become an essential selling channel (Giessmann and Stanoevska-Slabeva 2012). Anecdotal evidence suggests that such offerings for B2B SaaS applications already exist on the market. In the context of this study, we distinguish between an EM and a platform ecosystem as two separable concepts. Though, the EM can either be a standalone marketplace or in some instances can be considered the selling channel as a part of the platform ecosystem. The concept of development platforms and sales marketplaces are quite popular in the mobile applications segment for consumers, e.g. Apples App Store (see e.g. Basole and Karla 2011). We would like to complement this perspective by focusing on business applications (B2B).