MIS Distinguished Speaker Series

Temple University

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IT Outsourcing

Mar 26 – Kunsoo Han to present “Green Cloud? An Empirical Analysis of Cloud Computing and Energy Efficiency”

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Green Cloud? An Empirical Analysis of Cloud Computing and Energy Efficiency

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Kunsoo Han

Associate Professor
Bensadoun Faculty Scholar
Desautels Faculty of Management
McGill University

Friday, Mar 26

9 – 10 am | Zoom

(send an email to ayabakan@temple.edu to get the Zoom link)

Abstact:

The rapid, widespread adoption of cloud computing over the past decade has sparked debates on its environmental impacts among practitioners and academics alike. While prior literature has extensively scrutinized the energy-consuming characteristics of cloud computing on the vendor side, very little attention has been paid to its broader, economy-wide impacts on the client side, although the latter effect may be substantially greater. Drawing upon production theory and using a stochastic frontier analysis, this study examines the impact of cloud computing on client industries’ energy efficiency. To this end, we develop a novel industry-level measure of cloud-based information technology (IT) services. Using U.S. economy-wide data from 57 industries during 1997–2017, our findings suggest that cloud-based IT services improve energy efficiency, and this effect appears to be driven mainly by Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), rather than Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Moreover, this effect is significant only after 2006, when cloud computing started to be commercialized, and becomes even stronger after 2010. While SaaS contributes to energy efficiency improvement across industries, we find that the positive contribution of IaaS to energy efficiency is significant only in IT hardware-intensive industries. Finally, the main effects of SaaS on energy efficiency are universally significant for both electric and non-electric energy efficiency, whereas IaaS is positively associated with electric energy efficiency when IT hardware intensity is high. From the analysis, we estimate the economy-wide savings in energy costs due to cloud computing to be 2.8 to 12.6 billion US dollars in 2017 alone, equivalent to a reduction in electricity use by 31.8 to 143.8 billion kilowatt-hours. Our estimate exceeds the total energy expenditure in the cloud services vendor industries and is comparable to total electricity consumption in U.S. data centers. Additional firm-level survey analysis corroborates the findings from industry-level econometric analysis. We discuss implications for research and practice.

Feb 16: Anjana Susarla to speak on Social Capital, Reputation and Contract Design in Buyer-Supplier Networks

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Anjana Susarla

Assistant Professor,
Tepper School of Business,
Carnegie Mellon University

February 16, 2011

Speakman Hall 200, 1000am – 1130am

Seminar Title : Social Capital, Reputation and Contract Design in Buyer-Supplier Networks

Abstract

Prior research on inter-firm contracting has identified the ideal governance mode to be either Formal‟ or „Relational‟ governance modes. However, both streams of literature rely on stringent assumptions about the cost of breaching contractual obligations and the mechanism of enforcement. We propose an embeddedness-based governance logic by examining an inter-organizational network of exchange partners. The buyer-seller network acts as a conduit for market actors to exchange information about exchange opportunities as well as the actual services traded, providing a mechanism for community enforcement. A firm‟s social capital in the network could assuage concerns about opportunism whereby a firm can maintain a reputation for performance. A firm‟s position in the network also acts as a signal of its ability and quality to agents beyond the dyad. We analyze a large dataset of public information technology (IT) outsourcing announcements using multi-way cluster-robust and network auto-regression techniques. We examine the impact of firms‟ position in the inter-organizational network on an important contract design element, the duration of contracts. We find that a network position whereby a firm is associated with central trading partners is likely to predict longer contract duration. We find that this relationship holds even after controlling for a number of alternate causal explanations. Implications for practitioners and research are discussed.

For a copy of the paper, click here.