Making sense of academia-industry gap in the evolving cloud service brokerage

Abstract

Two key elements to bridge the academia-industry gap are communication and collaboration. The purpose of any such effort is co-creation of knowledge and developing continually informed relationships. Cloud computing has got a significant interest from both academia and industry. It offers a myriad of possibilities for software engineering researchers to study the development of multilateral software. With cloud-based products and services growing exponentially in their popularity and usage, there grew a need for a business model to effectively manage cloud costs, resources, capacity, agility and flexibility [3]. Cloud Service Brokers (CSBs) have emerged as a solution to address this growing need and facilitate smooth cloud adoption, management, migration and maintenance for cloud users and providers [4] [5]. According to Gartner, the CSB sector is expected to grow to a whopping $ 100 Billion in revenue by the end of 2014 [1]. However, there is an evident void in the academic research space in the area of CSBs. For example, owing to the absence of a centralized registry of the CSB utilities, it is extremely difficult for cloud users to select a CSB. In this paper, we provide an analysis of industry and academia role in this area highlighting industry issues in which academia can participate.