A Cloud-driven View on Business Process as a Service

Cloud computing is the promise to provide flexible IT solutions. This correlates with an increasing demand
in flexibility of business processes in companies. However, there is still a huge gap between business and
IT management. The evolution of cloud service models tries to bridge this by bringing up fine grained and
multi-dimensional service models. One of the new service models is Business Process as a Service (BPaaS),
which promises to bridge the gap from business process to cloud computing. Yet, the BPaaS paradigm is
not thoroughly classified with respect to the cloud computing characteristics. In this paper we introduce a
first classification of the BPaaS paradigm with the focus on the common cloud characteristics. Therefore, we
analyze the traditional path from a business process model to its execution via on-demand resources and derive
a leveled model for BPaaS. For each level, we introduce the entities on that level in terms of (i) correlation
to cloud characteristics, (ii) concepts and (iii) tools, and evaluate its cloudification options, i.e. the ability to
support the provision of a business process as a service. The presented work enables the categorisation of items
in the BPaaS paradigm and outlines how traditional business processes can be enabled for cloud delivery. This
classification and analysis will be extended, once the BPaaS paradigm reached wider acceptance in academia
and industry, and more standards evolved.