Software as a Service (SaaS) can provide significant benefits to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to advantages like ease of access, 7*24 availability, and utility pricing. However, underlying the SaaS delivery model is often the assumption that SMEs will directly interact with the SaaS vendor and use a self-service approach. In practice, we see the rise of SaaS intermediaries who can su...

This article investigates how small companies providing new-technology-based services (T-KIBS) manage their client contacts. Many KIBS companies have extensive and close contacts with their clients, to the extent that their services can actually be co-produced together with the clients. This study analyzes data from four empirical cases and provides new knowledge on the relevance, forms and con...

The market for the new provisioning type Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has reached a significant size and still shows enormous growth rates. By varying size of SaaS products, providers can improve their market position and profits by successfully acting in the tension area of customer acquisition, pricing and costs. We firstly elaborate differences concerning product differentiation between clas...

This research advanced the development for a theoretical framework of service experience in Service Science discipline. Service experience is composed of a series of complicated services and influenced by many factors. Customer psychological status is the important one to be investigated. Accordingly, we proposed a theoretical framework of service experience based on the perspectives of custome...

Cloud Computing and especially Software as a Service (SaaS) is predicted to bring about the next information technology (IT) revolution. Benefits and risks have been discussed extensively in both research and practice. Key benefits like higher flexibility and lower costs are confronted with major risks such as loss of data control. These benefits and risks are predominantly discussed in the con...

The idea behind Cloud Computing is to deliver Infrastructure-as-aServices and Software-as-a-Service over the Internet on an easy pay-per-use business model. To harness the potentials of Cloud Computing for e-Learning and research purposes, and to smalland medium-sized enterprises, the Hochschule Furtwangen University establishes a new project, called Cloud Infrastructure & Applications (CloudIA...

Service innovation is increasingly being recognized as an important strategy for firms to sustain competitive advantage. The interconnectivity and interactivity afforded through information technologies (IT) has transformed how new services are created, delivered, and experienced. With the newness of the phenomenon and the lack of understanding, information systems (IS) research examining the i...

Design of software solution for delivery as a shared service over Cloud requires specific considerations. In this chapter we describe an approach for design of infrastructure resource management as a service for use by group of institution based on Service Oriented Architecture, Software-as-a-Service, and Cloud Computing paradigms. Our goal in this paper is to propose a architecture mechanism t...