Examining ‘as-a-service’: the duality of software-as-a-service (SaaS)

Guide(s)

De, Rahul

Department

Information Systems

Area

Information Systems

University

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Place

Bangalore

Publication Date

3-31-2021

Year Awarded

March 2021

Year Completed

March 2021

Year Registered

June 2011

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 “on-demand” 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 “as-a-service” to the software provider. The ‘as-a-service’ 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 ‘as-a-service’ 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.

Pagination

239p.

Copyright

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Document Type

Dissertation

DAC Chairperson

De, Rahul

DAC Members

Bandi, Rajendra K; Bhagavatula, Suresh

Type of Degree

Ph.D.

Relation

DIS-IIMB-FPM-P21-03

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS