Guest Post: Ilyas Iyoob, Director, Advanced Analytics and Sr. Research Scientist, PhD at Gravitant

We first went from reserving cloud capacity to securing capacity on-demand, and then we even started to bid for unused capacity in the spot market – all in an effort to decrease cost in the cloud.  Can we take this one step further?  Instead of us bidding for capacity, wouldn’t it be interesting if we can get providers to bid for our demand?

Retail supply chain market analogy

In fact, this is a common phenomena in the retail supply chain industry.  For example, Walmart has a large amount of freight that needs to be shipped between different cities over the course of the year.  So, every year an auction is conducted in which Walmart lists all their shipments, and carriers such as JB Hunt, Schneider, Yellow etc. bid for the opportunity to carry these shipments using …