Identifying and Evaluating the Demand Side Factors Influencing the Choice of Software-As A Service: An Integrative Framework

The ever increasing internet bandwidth and the fast changing needs of businesses for effectiveness and integration within and with the partners and the distributed /mobile employee force is leading organizations to adopt information systems infrastructures that are cost effective as well as flexible. The question seems to be: what is driving organizations to go in for SAAS rather than the SWS model of software provisioning? Some of the major drawbacks of SWS model of software provisioning are the high upfront and implementation costs. Also the software is difficult and costly to maintain and upgrade. Long lead times, high costs, complex planning sessions and deployment delays inherent to SWS, make SAAS a viable may to overcome these challenges and provide easy-to-use and cost-effective tools for system integration. Whereas there have been studies reporting technology, cost, quality ,network externalities and process as the main variables in the utility function of the user , but most of the studies have modeled either one or two in the their models . The study is an attempt to create an integrative framework with a comprehensive list of factors which affect choice of SAAS .The proposed framework is also tested on an initial sample of 15 respondents and the relative importance and the weights of the factors identified