From an e-business revenue model to its software reference architecture

Revenue models define how a company creates their revenues and hence they are an integral part of business models. While a lot of research on business models and revenue models of the e-Business already exists, there is a shortfall of a concept to derive appropriate software architectures for the underlying software system directly from these models. This is interesting since a software system for companies of the e-Business is the fundamental basis to operate this business in practice. In this paper a concept is introduced to derive an important part of the overall software architecture for business models based on a characterization of its revenue model. For that purpose, a 'classification cycle' is defined including a set of criteria which enables you to conclude technical decisions for the design of a software architecture. Using this classification cycle, a variety of revenue models can be identified. Within this paper we focus on the specific revenue model subscription of services as one example. The derived architecture serves as a software reference architecture for all business models which are based on this type of revenue model. It means that in case a software system has to be developed for a business model using this revenue model, the software architecture presented in this paper can be used as a sample solution to refer to. Thus, it helps architects to derive a fundamental part of the overall software architecture in an easy and efficient way.