Classroom Companion: Business

Box 6.1 Anything as a Service
Infrastructure
O/S
Applications
Data
SaaS
Infrastructure
O/S
Applications
Data
PaaS
Infrastructure
O/S
Applications
Data
IaaS
Infrastructure
O/S
Applications
Data
On-premises/ Self-managed
XaaS provider 
managed
. Fig. 6.1 Examples of XaaS. From on-premises systems where everything is self- 
managed (left) to SaaS where only data is self-managed. (Authors’ own figure)
6.1 · Definitions

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6
E-banking (online banking or Internet 
banking) is the provision of digital 
banking services using the Internet 
and mobile devices. The consumer can 
access their bank data and perform 
bank operations at any time and from 
any geographical location. E-banking 
has disrupted the traditional banking 
services by providing permanent access 
to the bank from anywhere and at 
Digital goods and services are different from physical products (or tangible goods). 
Physical products have presence in the physical domain, while digital goods are built 
up by sequences of bits and exist only as pieces of software or data stored on com-
puters or other storage devices. Digital goods and services may be combined to 
form larger and more complex digital goods and services before being offered to 
consumers. One simple example is the use of the secure digital payment solution 
offered by Google Play where the same platform is used to support the app soft-
ware, to pay the developer for use of the app, and to collect payments from the user. 
A similar but more complex example is to use smartphones as authentication tokens 
for secure access to bank accounts (see 
7
Box 
6.2
). This case involves the primary 
service provider (the bank), the authentication provider (the mobile operator), and 
one or more clearinghouses which supervise and guarantee the validity of the 
authentication process. This example illustrates that a new digital good or service 
may be constructed by linking digital goods and services delivered by several inde-
pendent stakeholders, in this case, banking, mobile operation, clearinghouse tech-
nology, and Internet operation. The ecosystem of the new product may then become 
complex consisting of elements from the ecosystem of each stakeholder.
Dropbox is an example of an IaaS 
offering storage of data for anyone in one 
of their data centers. The user can access 
the data via the Internet from anywhere 
and at any time. App Engine of Google is 
a PaaS platform where app developers 
can develop software for the web applica-
tions. Vortex is an SaaS offering gaming 
services. Using Vortex, the player need 
not install, store, or process the game in 
the player’s own computer since all pro-
cessing is done in Vortex servers.
Blockchain technology is also offered 
as a service called Blockchain as a Service 
(BaaS). Consumers buy access to BaaS 
without installing the complex process-
ing software needed to support the ser-
vice. Amazon, Oracle, and IBM are 
examples of companies offering BaaS.
XaaS has changed the way in which 
companies invest in ICT. Companies 
buying services from an XaaS provider 
need no longer bind capital on long-term 
investments since the use of XaaS con-
verts these investments into short-term 
running costs. The capital costs of offer-
ing XaaS may be huge since XaaS usually 
requires large investments in computing 
infrastructure and support of fast and 
reliable communication networks to han-
dle many simultaneous customers and 
process huge amounts of data.