The future of service marketplaces in the cloud

For as long as there have been services there has been a desire to have a convenient medium to expose and discover service offerings. Since early on, various efforts have attempted various approaches at the exchange of computational services, prompting the question of whether there is a market for Web services. We believe that a services marketplace should fulfill the promise of an electronic emporium where third party service providers are able to offer their services in a ubiquitous ecosystem, and where service consumers are able to acquire service solutions that are tailored to their requirements. This paper explores the landscape of cloud services marketplaces, where we are, what enablers are needed to realize the vision, and it presents a prospective architecture to that end. © 2012 IEEE.