Strategies of Development and Competition of Cloud Services Market: Strategy Simulations of Apple iCloud
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Tang, Shih-Che
Abstract
In the booming markets of cloud computing and cloud services, the infrastructure-as-a -service (IaaS) has great potential growth in near future, and cloud storage service - one type of IaaS – has become popular nowadays. In June 2011, Apple announced its cloud storage service “iCloud” to work with Apple’s hardware products.
Apple’s iCloud is a new and unproved entrant in cloud services market, so it has to be led by Apple’s popular and widely-accepted mobile “iDevices” - including iPhone, iPad and iPod touch - to enter the market. In order to know better about the success of iDevices, which is the foundation of development of iCloud, the detailed studies of business model and cash flows of iDevices have conducted in this thesis.
Based on the public information of iCloud and the understanding of Apple’s iDevices, a 3-phase strategy of development of iCloud is proposed and analyzed by method of strategy simulation from the angles of entrepreneurs and top executives. According to the strategy, iCloud is a supportive role at first, to assist the sale of iDevices and music in Apple’s online music store, the iTunes Store, then follow iDevices to get into enterprises and the business devices and services markets. Besides, the 3 phases in the strategy can all operate like a multisided platform and catalyze the needs between consumers and iDevices/iTunes Store and iCloud and enterprises, and help Apple to make high revenue.
But during the development of iCloud, Google, Microsoft and Amazon are the big 3 challengers, so the competition status between iCloud and big 3 challengers is also elaborated and analyzed by method of strategy simulation in this thesis. After these analyses, the main targets and goals of iCloud in each phase, and the counter-attacks from the big 3 can be shown more clearly. In sum, regardless of the fierce fight backs from the big 3, I believe iCloud still can achieve its goal in each phase, but the big 3 will use the same strategy of own service-device cooperation to compete with iCloud and iDevices.
From the aspect of whole cloud services markets, Apple breaks into the market by the power of iDevices. This move is different from Google, Microsoft and Amazon, but each company has its own directions and strategies for future development. These would be the good topics for future research.
Subjects
cloud computing
cloud storage service
business model
strategy of development
platform
Type
thesis
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