Business model has been regarded as a vehicle that closes the gap between the abstract and the practice within strategic management and international business. Despite this, our knowledge of how international business models are created or transformed has remained elusive and empirical research on the topic remains rare. By revisiting the Internet internationalization and e-business model literature, this paper explores the transformation of international business models in the context of international ICT businesses where cloud computing has triggered a major paradigm change in the way how software and hardware related services are offered to international customers.

Earlier research indicates that e-business have several implications to internationalization, including speeded up and earlier start of the internationalization processes, dilution of the sequencing of the internationalization process, virtualization of (international) locations and services, multiple simultaneous market entry through the Internet, and enhanced building of international networks.

All these changes have major consequences on the business models of the firms, and among international e-businesses the emergence of cloud service concepts – such as IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and DaaS (Data-as-a-Service) – has brought about a need to fundamentally rethink the business models. Through comparative analysis of two cases companies, this paper examines the business model transformation processes in the cloud computing context, and contributes by re-conceptualizing the international business model as a concept and by rooting the conceptualization with the business model transformation process.

Petri Ahokangas , Marko Juntunen , Jenni Myllykoski (University of Oulu) 2014: Cloud Computing and Transformation of International E-Business Models, in Ron Sanchez , AimÉ Heene (ed.) A Focused Issue on Building New Competences in Dynamic Environments (Research in Competence-Based Management, Volume 7)

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/S1744-211720140000007001