The way in which IT resources and services are being provisioned is currently in flux. Advances in distributed systems technology have allowed for the provisioning of services on an unprecedented scale and with increasing flexibility. At the same time, business and academia have started to embrace a model wherein third-party services that can be acquired with minimal service provider interaction, replace or complement those that are managed internally. Organizations have only started to grasp the economic implications of this evolution.

As a global market for infrastructure, platform and software services emerges, the need to understand and deal with these implications is quickly growing. In addition, a multitude of new challenges arise. These are inherently multidisciplinary and relate to aspects such as the operation and structure of the service market, the alignment of cost, revenue and quality-related objectives when taking on a service consumer or provider role, and the creation of innovative business models and value chains. These challenges emerge in other service domains as well, for example in the coordinated operation of the next generation electricity grids that are characterized by distributed generation facilities and new consumption patterns.

GECON invites researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to present and discuss economics-related issues and solutions associated with these developments and challenges. Contributed work can comprise extensions to existing technologies, successful deployments of technologies, economic analysis, and theoretical concepts. The purpose of this event is to gather original work and build a strong multidisciplinary community in this increasingly important area of a future information economy.

ABSTRACT: Since years the volume of IT done by "normal" companies is going down - and IT industries are growing and growing. On the other hand the volume on research on software companies and other IT vendors is limited. The aim of this talk is to highlight interesting fields of research on software companies, on software industries and on software markets. Current trends such as cloud computing are included.

BIO: Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess is Professor of Management and Information Systems at the Munich School of Management, University of Munich, Germany, since 2001. He is also director of the Institute for Information Systems and New Media at the same school, coordinator of the Munich "Center for Internet Re­search and Media Integration" (ZIM) and member of the Board of the "Center for Digital Technology and Management" (CDTM), both located in Munich. From 2008 to 2011 Thomas Hess also served as Dean of the Munich School of Management.

Thomas Hess was born in 1967 in Darmstadt, Germany. He studied at Darmstadt University of Technology ("Diplom" in Business Informatics) and at St. Gallen University, Switzerland (Doctorate). He worked as post-doc at Goettingen University, Germany, and was visiting professor at the Nanyang University, Singapore, and at the Turku School of Economics and Business Administration, Finland. Thomas Hess further has professional experiences as a management consultant and as an assistant to the board of Bertelsmann AG.

His research is dedicated to IT-enabled Business Systems. The current focus is on the digitalization of the media industry, on software vendors and on value systems. Thomas Hess has published in international journals such as "Journal of Management Information Systems", "Information Systems Journal", "European Journal of Information Systems", "International Journal of Electronic Commerce", "Communications of the ACM", "Electronic Markets" and "International Journal on Media Management". His works has been presented at conferences such as ICIS, ECIS and AMCIS. Additionally, he serves as an editor of several scientific journals and as a member of multiple editorial boards.

ABSTRACT: Common ITIL practice dictates the definition of service level agreements, service catalogues and implicit cost management. This also applies to scientific IT service organizations. There is an opportunity to link these requirements with the common trend to adopt cloud services, which are per definition self-managed, highly scalable and automated. Here, automatic SLA management could be a solution to use ITIL SLA paradigms to actually manage services. The talk gives some examples to actual scientific cloud services, and the corresponding technical and scientific challenges.

BIO: Since October 2011, Ramin Yahyapour is managing director of the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung Göttingen mbH (GWDG) and a full professor at the Institute of Computer Science at Göttingen University. Between March 2007 and September 2011 he was director at the IT and Media Center of the TU Dortmund University and since April 2009 he was professor in Dortmund with a chair in Service Computing at the Faculty of Computer Science. He was also appointed Chief Information Officer of the university. He was with the Computer Engineering Institute at the University Dortmund between 1996 and 2007. His research interests lie in the area of service computing, distributed computing, and resource management for grid and cloud infrastructures.