E-Procurement in the Era of Cloud Computing

This paper aims to present the Cloud-Marketplaces approach that delivers a new paradigm to e-marketplaces. The proposed Cloud-Marketplaces architecture is a combination of the Cloud Computing paradigm and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and decouples the traditional e-marketplaces into E-marketplaces and Community Services Clouds. The new e-marketplace architecture is being experimented in a real business scenario, and the case study of Vortalway, an industrial-based research project conducted by a major international e-Marketplace, is presented. The paper concludes that despite the Cloud-Marketplaces paradigm is technically a sound concept, besides the engineering and technological issues, it poses interesting challenges regarding business models.