Factors for Adopting ERP as SaaS amongst SMEs: The Customers vs. Vendor Point of View

This paper identifies the factors for adopting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) among small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The authors conducted a two phases' qualitative-methodology: interviews with 20 experts from SaaS vendor (Microsoft) and a case-study with executives in three organizations which implemented vendor's ERP as SaaS (customers). The vendor identified 10 factors for adoption - Costs, Security, Availability, Usability, Implementation, Ubiquity, Flexibility, Compatibility, Analytics and Best-practices, where costs, security and availability were considered the most important factors. The three customers identified 3 additional factors: the trust in the Solution partner, Data integrity, and level of Integration of cloud platforms. Considering all 13 factors, Cost, trust in the Solution partner and Availability were identified as the most important for customers, which gave much less importance to the others factors. These results will help professionals and researchers to improve understanding and accelerate ERP adoption as SaaS among SMEs