To:                                               Alan Lewis

Subject:                                     RE: IdP as a Service Business Canvas

 

 

 

Hello Mario,

 

Although we didn’t directly use the canvas today I think we covered a lot of the areas around ‘Customers and Revenues’ that we planned to discuss and I’ll add these to the comments and update on the WIKI.

Here in brief is my understanding of what we covered:

 

1. Targets for the offering
1. Main target is platform lifecycle management for federations wishing to provide a cloud hosted solution;
2. A hosted service from NRENS and/or GEANT is also possible but is a more difficult proposition;
3. A secondary target is for HO admins wishing to manage their own IdP.  This could be by a delegation model to the platform;
4. Providing a GUI to the Ansible toolkit to allow configuration of IdPs on premises is out of scope of the platform but could be considered in task 1.

 

2. Costs and cost benefit

At this point in the analysis we don’t spent to much time on a detailed analysis of the cost of offering the service because:

1. The model we adopt will dictate how much detail we need to go into to determine costs. e.g if we provide the source freely we don’t want to waste time on such an analysis;
2. There are many variables and assumptions and arriving at a figure will be difficult to address now. We may need to return to this later.

 

3. Alternative of substitutional offerings

As yet not aware of any substitutional or disruptive offerings that would render the current approach invalid.

A number of NRENS (GRNET, SWITCH,CESNET, RENATER etc. and commercial providers have offerings in this area. It would be useful to understand for these offerings:

1. Features;
2. Uptake (but difficult for the commercial offerings);
3. Pricing (or business model);
4. Any issues (e.g. GDPR).

Revisit the Marketing Analysis done previously to update and add to the information on the points above. This will help us to validate what our MVP should be.

 

4. Offering considerations
1. A SW solution as opposed to a service might be harder to push adoption of but the offering could include on-premise technical support/consultancy. This might not scale well;
2. Involving the target adopters as stakeholders in the development might encourage adoption (as was the hope in GN4-2), but may be hard to achieve in practice;
3. Currently we have two potential implementations – Campus IdP platform and SAMLIdP.io. We will need to decide how to progress, and what constraints we have in development, but need to clarify the requirements before we can do this.
4. We might consider a bundled offering (say IdP and eduroam) in order to differentiate and make the offering more attractive.

 

Next time we can address the RHS of the canvas in more detail and think about the revenue (or lack of) side of things.

I would estimate a couple more iterations before we have a more concrete direction.

We may want to consider a F2F session for a day or two in the future to advance quickly on the details.

 

Best regards

 

Alan