Cloud Enterprise Systems: A Review Of Literature And Its Adoption

In recent years, Cloud computing has revolutionalized the IT industry by introducing a whole new concept and platform of enterprise systems (ES). The traditional ES seem to be too clunky, expensive and complex for most organizations to implement anduse. To improve such situation Cloud ES concept was recently introduced to offer competitive advantage to organizations through flexibility, scalability and independence in IT infrastructure and capabilities. Today, this area has not been fully explored in the academia due to little available literature but it has attracted tremendous interest from the general practitioners. This study seeks to contribute to IS literature by conceptualising Cloud ES from a pragmatic understanding between practitioners and academic. It further elaborates the advantages and challenges of Cloud ES and discussesthe potential of Cloud ES as an attractive option to SME in solving the problems of high investments in IT infrastructures and IT resources

Software as a Service (SaaS) for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): The Role of Intermediaries

Software as a Service (SaaS) is anticipated to provide significant benefits to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to ease of access to high-end applications, 7*24 availability, utility pricing, etc. However, underlying SaaS is the assumption that SMEs will directly interact with the SaaS vendor and use a self-service model. In practice, we see the rise of SaaS intermediaries who support SMEs with using SaaS. This paper reports on an empirical study of the role of intermediaries in terms of how they support SMEs in sourcing and leveraging SaaS for their business. The contributions of this paper are: (1) the identification and description of the role of SaaS intermediaries and (2) the specification of different roles of SaaS intermediaries, in particular a more basic role focussing on technological and operational issues and a more added value role with a broader customer and strategic alignment perspective

Moving enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to the cloud: the challenge of infrastructural embeddedness

Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions allow organizations to support and coordinate key business processes by leveraging virtualization. Nevertheless, moving ERPs to the cloud is not straightforward, and organizational cloud ERP initiatives raise multiple concerns. We conducted an in-depth systematic review of relevant research literature and identified six key concerns related to cloud ERP implementation: a) the introduction of new ERP work arrangements, launch b) the migration of legacy data, c) the assurance of compliance with extant rules and regulations for security, d) the continuous alignment between ERP functionality and business processes, e) the ongoing integration between ERPs and the rest of the organization’s application portfolio, and f) the establishment of adequate reliability levels. The identified concerns are associated with both transition management and operations supported by cloud ERPs. All the identified concerns are also related to the need to achieve infrastructural embeddedness. This need sets ERPs apart from other types of cloud-based applications, such as office automation solutions that do not have as many dependencies and exchanges with other systems and repositories within an organization’s information infrastructure. We argue that the challenge of embeddedness has different implications for organizations of different sizes, and we call for further empirical research