The Market for Services: Economic Criteria, Immaturities, and Critical Success Factors

Mature service markets, which facilitate the reuse of services by efficiently coordinating service supply and demand, are a cornerstone for the breakthrough of the service-oriented computing (SOC) paradigm. Accordingly, the Web service technology already comprises a standard for the creation of service registries to ease the development of service marketplaces. In parallel with the increasing popularity of SOC, forecasts have moreover prophesied service marketplaces to rapidly evolve and become lucrative. Up to now, however, only very few service marketplaces emerged and managed to establish themselves. To investigate possible reasons, we analyze the structure of today's service markets against the criteria of perfect markets as benchmarks from economic theory. As a result, we identify numerous immaturities of today's service markets which are closely examined. To mitigate identified immaturities, we derive critical success factors and describe how to transform them into marketplace features. In particular, we show the resulting architecture of CompoNex - a model marketplace, which is currently being developed in a design science approach to facilitate the trading of services in today's markets.