Examining as a service

Abstract

Servitization in the IT industry is gaining momentum due to service models supported by cloud computing CC technologies and business models innovations The CC based Software as a Service SaaS or the 8220 on demand 8221 software model is disrupting the software industry as it changes the way software is developed delivered marketed and sold An increasing number of businesses are becoming SaaS providers even from the non software industries such as automobile and banking industries as they expand their services leveraging the data being generated by the embedded digital technologies such as Internet of Things using cloud based applications The growing popularity of SaaS underlines the need to understand the implication of 8220 as a service 8221 to the software provider The 8216 as a service 8217 aspect of SaaS embodies features of both products and services hence challenges existing classifications of them and raises several issues for the SaaS provider Following popular industry discourse existing studies consider SaaS as simply another service model of Cloud computing or as a form of IT outsourcing and hence ignore the essence of SaaS This research aims to study the nature of SaaS and its implication for the SaaS provider This thesis is organized into three essays The first essay is a literature review of SaaS using a hermeneutic approach to understand the existing knowledge and perspectives about the 8216 as a service 8217 nature of SaaS This review is among the first to conduct a focused review of the extant literature on SaaS The assumptions made about the nature of the SaaS artefact reflect the perspectives adopted in the SaaS studies such as a business model change an addition of IT services to the software product and a new form of IT outsourcing We found that the diversity and conflicting findings in the empirical studies of SaaS providers may be resolved by examining the conceptualization of SaaS newline newline