Dominik Ebinger

2019

The cloud technology changes the way how software vendors price, sell and deliver software. This entails new challenges for software companies. Questions arise like how to set prices for cloud services? How are cost information included? And what implementation challenges of pricing decisions can occur? Therefore, this thesis provides an empirical analysis of cost-based pricing for cloud services. There is no research existing about a detailed investigation of the types of cost information for pricing of cloud services. In addition, implementation challenges and solutions of pricing decisions are rarely discussed. This thesis aims to address these gaps. By conducting an interventionist research in a software company, the results give insights into organizational pricing processes. The steps from problem identification, validation, and solving of a pricing process are investigated with the help of a quantitative and qualitative analysis. The findings show that in the practice full-costs as a basis, and the long-term target margins as a markup are included for cost-based pricing for cloud services. In addition, the results contribute by illustrating implementation problems of pricing already discussed in the literature, of the one part, and by detecting a problem not discussed so far. At last, this thesis discusses possible solutions for solving the occurring problems.