Success Factors and Value Propositions of Software as a Service Providers - A Literature Review and Classification

The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, an overview is given, which success factors and value propositions have been investigated in recent research in the context of software as a service. Subsequently an indicator of each factor’s relevance is provided by counting the number of mentions in the IS literature. Second, it offers a categorization scheme of the extracted factors according to Delone and McLean’s IS success categories. To identify the relevant factors a literature review is conducted including high-ranked journal articles and conference proceedings, which are then complemented by referred books. Performance is found to be the most important success factor, while cost saving is the major value driver of software as a service. Additionally, the results show that many value propositions of software as a service are realized on an organizational level, while the most success factors to “run” the service can be found in the system quality category.