In this paper customer journey for B2B SaaS business models was analyzed to study customer experience, customer success and its key performance indicators. The research method is the case study of Supplier Relationship Management SaaS solution provider. In recent years, the research in customer journey management identified the tendency of acknowledge customer journey as a differentiator and a competitive advantage. Customer journey is a complex process that entails structured customer experience/success measurement system. There is no standard approach or method that provides standardized set of metrics to be applied for every journey. For SaaS solutions term “customer success” is relevant to customer experience with the solution and an indicator of customer loyalty. The purpose of the research is investigation of B2B SaaS business model and definition of key performance indicators of customer success. The case study aims to open a framework for discussion what is customer success in B2B SaaS solutions, when does it appear, and how a company influences and ensures customer success. / I den här rapporten analyserades kundresan för B2B SaaS affärsmodeller för att studerakundupplevelsen, "customer success" och dess viktigaste resultatindikatorer. Forskningsmetoden ärfallstudien för Supplier Relationship Management SaaS lösning.Under de senaste åren har forskningen inom kundresa identifierat tendensen att erkänna kundresansom en differentiering och en konkurrensfördel. Kundresan är en komplex process som innebär ettstrukturerat kundupplevelse- och framgångsmätningssystem. Det finns ingen standardmetod ellermetod som ger standardiserade uppsättningar av mätvärden som ska tillämpas för varje resa. För SaaSlösningen är termen "customer success" relevant för kundupplevelsen med lösningen som en indikator på kundlojalitet.Syftet med forskningen är att utreda B2B SaaS affärsmodell och definition av viktiga resultatindikatorer för "customer success". Fallstudien syftar till att öppna en ram för diskussion vad är "customer success" i B2B SaaS-lösningar, när det verkar och hur ett företag påverkar och säkerställer "customer success".

This thesis will describe SaaS (Software as a Service) business in a global environment. The prior focus will be to give suggestions of models and good examples of how to scale local business into global markets. The necessary theoretical framework on software product and scalability issues is given. Qualitative research is carried out to find out how the suggested models are adopted among selected ad serving companies. The results from three different companies were analyzed to find similarities and the extension of strategy described in theory.The main aim is to illustrate how scalability fits into each company’s business model rather thangain results for the whole industry.   Software industry is changing towards the SaaS business model. This paper describes the significant advantages over the traditional software distribution. SaaS can be easily accessible over the internet and provide more scalability for software vendors. Apart from cost efficiency SaaS gives flexibility in maintaining and updating the product. Most importantly it enables vendors to tap into the global customer base, as there is less dependency on local distribution.   Scalability has become a major factor for the success of software vendors. The stability of brand solutions is challenged by fast growing startup companies. Main theoretical framework of scalability criteria lies on the Stampfl, Prügl and Osterloh (2013) model. It suggests most important components of designing and implementing scalable businesses. General insight of market expansion strategies are based on Gupta and Govindarajan (2000) framework and adopted to software industry.   Qualitative research methods were chosen for this study. Interviews were carried out with three vendors representing advertising technology companies. They qualified the important scalability issues and studied the strategies of expansion. Qualitative study allowed focusing on essential information that lies among the responsibilities of company managers.   Research result shows the similar path of scaling among the three interviewed companies. Importance of experience among startup owners and the need of a first engaging customer are highlighted as crucial. Findings suggest vendors to invest in well-developed system fundamentals that do not limit the scalability on later stages. Results prove that majority of development is coming from existing client requests. They are treated with highest priority due to the nature of business to business relations. Nevertheless, categorization of clients is needed, to decide if developments should be entered in product roadmap. The strategy of “launch vehicle” was confirmed by one of the vendor which has several products on its portfolio. Global expansion is described in the theory and was discussed on interviews. SaaS companies express great strive towards scaling their business internationally. Presence on global software markets like US is treated as the only chance for winning competitors in a long run. They never stop looking for growth and exploring new possibilities that would help them getting there.

This thesis will describe SaaS (Software as a Service) business in a global environment. The prior focus will be to give suggestions of models and good examples of how to scale local business into global markets. The necessary theoretical framework on software product and scalability issues is given. Qualitative research is carried out to find out how the suggested models are adopted among selected ad serving companies. The results from three different companies were analyzed to find similarities and the extension of strategy described in theory.The main aim is to illustrate how scalability fits into each company’s business model rather than gain results for the whole industry.   Software industry is changing towards the SaaS business model. This paper describes the significant advantages over the traditional software distribution. SaaS can be easily accessible over the internet and provide more scalability for software vendors. Apart from cost efficiency SaaS gives flexibility in maintaining and updating the product. Most importantly it enables vendors to tap into the global customer base, as there is less dependency on local distribution.   Scalability has become a major factor for the success of software vendors. The stability of brand solutions is challenged by fast growing startup companies. Main theoretical framework of scalability criteria lies on the Stampfl, Prügl and Osterloh (2013) model. It suggests most important components of designing and implementing scalable  businesses. General insight of market expansion strategies are based on Gupta and Govindarajan (2000) framework and adopted to software industry.   Qualitative research methods were chosen for this study. Interviews were carried out with three vendors representing advertising technology companies. They qualified the important scalability issues and studied the strategies of expansion. Qualitative study allowed focusing on essential information that lies among the responsibilities of company managers.   Research result shows the similar path of scaling among the three interviewed companies. Importance of experience among startup owners and the need of a first engaging customer are highlighted as crucial. Findings suggest vendors to invest in well-developed system fundamentals that do not limit the scalability on later stages. Results prove that majority of development is coming from existing client requests. They are treated with highest priority due to the nature of business to business relations. Nevertheless, categorization of clients is needed to decide if developments should be entered in product roadmap. The strategy of “launch vehicle” was confirmed by one of the vendor which has several products on its portfolio.   Global expansion is described in the theory and was discussed on interviews. SaaS companies express great strive towards scaling their business internationally. Presence on global software markets like US is treated as the only chance for winning competitors in a long run. They never stop looking for growth and exploring new possibilities that would help them getting there.

User onboarding är ett grundläggande element för SaaS-företag och onlinetjänster som vill öka sin kundkrets och att sedermera bibehålla den, då detta påvisar en plattforms värde på ett omedelbart sätt samt bevarar nya kunders engagemang. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka vad user onboarding i form av en interaktiv produktguide har för påverkan på en SaaS-produkts användbarhet och learnability, med en förhoppning om att bidra till en ökning i dessa. I studien har användartester och enkäter använts för att undersöka eventuella skillnader innan respektive efter implementering av onboarding-aktiviteten. Resultatet pekar mot en oförändrad grad av användbarhet och learnability rent kvantitativt, samtidigt som en positiv inställning till produktguiden och en självupplevd känsla av ökad learnability även kan ses hos användarna ur ett kvalitativt perspektiv.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) has been around since the mid 2000's and is a practical option in contrast to the on-premise IT solutions where SMEs need to invest on purchasing or building their own IT infrastructures which means install the software themself, design the applications and have a whole IT division employed by the company to keep up with everything. Regardless of whether SaaS applications have been around for some time, SMEs actually have a ton of inquiries on whether these applications are a suitable choice for them.  This research explores the factors that contribute to adoption of SaaS solutions in the Swedish SMEs. The factors are explored through the usage of technological, organisational, environmental framework that contribute towards adoption of SaaS in the Swedish small and medium sized companies. In order to answer the research question of this study and to understand the Swedish SMEs perspective, a qualitative study was conducted with a deductive approach. Six semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with respondents from six different SMEs who have already been in the process of adopting and have adopted SaaS.  This thesis resulted in finding a significant process contributing to adoption of SaaS from Swedish SMEs perspective. The process is found to have a specific pattern because of the effect of the factors involved.

Innovation of new technology and its adoption contributes not only increasing the businessvalues but as well facilities the business growth and agility to an organization. Cloudcomputing provides hiring, renting and provisioning exclusive use of IT services as ondemand,pay-per-use basis via Internet. This emergence technology has shifted the competitiveIT-landscapes by providing a new computational platform for effective, creativeand deliverable business value model. However, many small organizations are reluctantto deploy their IT platform to Cloud due to the diverse adoption barriers cloud suffers.Despite this the promising attributes CC offers such as of IT operational cost reduction,accessibility and instant deployment makes it a vital embarking point to adopt this technologyespecially small and medium base enterprises (SME). Since SMEs are exploringthe possibilities of adopting this technology, it is imperative for them to critically evaluatethe feasibility of this technology for their specific businesses. This paper aims to investigatecloud adoption factors which might pursue pertaining or embarking cloud integrationamong SME’s. An on line web based survey instrument using questionnaires was used toconduct the study. The conclusive findings of the study suggests that Cloud computinghas the potential to transform the existing business operation, increase the business valuesand agility, customer relationship also promote sustainable competitive business edgefor SMEs while reducing the IT capital expenditure investment cost. The findings willassist IT managers/Chief Technology and /or Information Officers(CTO/CIO) representsthe SMEs for considering a possible adoption approach to cloud services.

New capabilities required to succeed in the new Cloud environment represent a radical change for software companies, which have to transition from selling on-the-premises software products to providing subscription-based cloud services (aka Software-as-a-Service or SaaS). While emerging SaaS vendors have led the exponential growth of the market, the traditional software industry has been disrupted. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze which capabilities are driving the performance of software firms in today’s cloud-computing environment by drawing upon the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm. What is the optimum spending across the primary firm capabilities (e.g., service delivery, R&D, marketing and sales) to maximize financial performance? This dissertation focuses on publicly-traded SaaS companies using publicly-available information from financial databases, corporate investor relations materials, and industry research. It is comprised of two essays. The first essay is a quantitative study based on secondary data. The second essay includes an extensive literature review, an analysis of in-depth interviews of practitioners, and mini case studies. Together, the essays contribute to RBV theory and provide useful insights to help assess the quality of execution of SaaS growth strategies and improve financial planning and performance in the software industry for the cloud computing environment. Although the results come from firms in the SaaS industry, the findings from this study could cautiously generalize to firms in other emerging technology industries. The dissertation concludes with a detailed agenda for future research. / Business Administration/Interdisciplinary

Modern business applications are getting increasingly distributed as multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS). This leads to new challenges in terms of quality assurance, because all customers are directly affected by software changes. The resulting problem is to proactively determinate evolutionary effects. Because SaaS applications are often realized in the sense of a software product line, this thesis examines ways of using feature models to face the mentioned problem. For this purpose, two approaches are analyzed: extended feature models with quality attributes annotated per feature and the analysis of structural aspects of feature models and corresponding concrete configurations. The presented attributed feature model approach measures the quality of concrete configurations to make configurations comparable according to specific quality goals. Criteria are elicited for when configurations can be compared to draw helpful conclusions. The structural approach focuses economic questions that are quality assurance related, such as identifying features that none of the tenants selected in their application configurations. Furthermore, three algorithms are presented that demonstrate the structural analysis approach to gather information relevant to quality assurance.

Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-21T14:19:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Giuvane Conti.pdf: 4640595 bytes, checksum: 144683112870e74bdbcd0335c9aac15a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-10-29 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The growth of the smartphone market, combined with the technologies used in these devices, motivates the use of this equipment in field applications because of its georeferencing potential and internet access. In cloud computing, a prominent concept is the Internet of Things (IoT) due to the exponential growth of data where are generated in day-to-day. The idea of centralization of this data, acquired from various areas, such as agriculture, urban mobility, urbanization, government, health, business, etc., are current challenges that the IoT find out to solve. It still in contrast, NoSQL databases, which have some differentiating features from relational models and they have the potential to solve some of these challenges, such as horizontal growth, high data availability and easy storage of complex structures. Another promising technology to solve some of these challenges is the RESTful, a web service that provides faster and works with fewer bytes than the communication with Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). In this context, this research was developed with the goal of creating a GIS Mobile application, to collect geospatial data (points, lines and polygons) and store them in an application server, in Software as a Service (SaaS) architecture, using RESTful and NoSQL. The structure follows the concept of IoT, with high potential for integration data from different areas, such as in this study. In this research were performed tests in field at the Fazenda Escola Capão-da-onça (FESCON) on 11 and 13 August 2015. A planning missions, has been pre - set to get the best results from Global Positioning System (GPS). On those dates were collected geo data on crop plots, lines and points of interest, such as erosion areas, failures in the soil and low productivity areas. The samples taken were successful and had no problems or failures, that is, the application provided facility of use and synchronization of the data with the application server. The results of the field surveys, have been exported to files in KML format and presented on thematic maps with the help of Google Earth tool. In conclusion, the project has a high potential for registration of agricultural properties and spatial geo data and, your architecture is relevant for the development of geospatial, agricultural projects in GIS Mobile area, where need to handle complex data and provide high data availability, such as Rural environmental registry (CAR, in brazil); Precision agriculture; Georeferenced control of agricultural, natural resources and urbanization data; and Business logistics applications. / O crescimento do mercado de smartphones, combinado com as tecnologias empregadas nestes aparelhos, motiva seu uso em aplicações a campo devido ao seu potencial de georreferenciamento e acesso a internet. Em computação na nuvem, um conceito proeminente é a Internet of Things (IoT) ou Internet das Coisas devido ao crescimento exponencial de dados que são gerados no dia-a-dia. A ideia da centralização destes dados, provenientes de várias áreas, como: agricultura, mobilidade urbana, urbanização, governamentais, saúde, empresariais, etc., são desafios atuais que a Internet das Coisas procura solucionar. Destaca-se ainda, os bancos de dados NoSQL, os quais possuem potencial para solução de alguns destes desafios. Outra tecnologia promissora para solucionar alguns destes desafios é o padrão RESTful, um web service que apresenta rapidez e trabalha com quantidades reduzidas de bytes em sua comunicação. Neste contexto, esta pesquisa foi desenvolvida com o objetivo de criar um Sistema de Informação Geográfica (SIG) Móvel, que realize a coleta de dados geoespaciais (pontos, linhas e polígonos), se comunique com um servidor de aplicação, no modelo Software as a Service (SaaS) que irá armazenar os dados em um banco de dados MongoDB e sua arquitetura segue o conceito de Internet das Coisas. Foram realizados testes a campo na Fazenda Escola Capão-da-onça (FESCON) nos dias 11 e 13 de agosto de 2015. Um planejamento de missões, foi pré - estabelecido, para obter os melhores resultados do Sistema de Posicionamento Global (GPS). Nas referidas datas foram coletados polígonos em talhões de culturas, linhas e pontos de interesse, tais como áreas de erosão, falhas no solo e áreas de baixa produtividade. As coletas realizadas foram bem sucedidas, o aplicativo proporcionou facilidade de uso e de sincronismo dos dados com o servidor de aplicação. Os resultados, dos levantamentos à campo, foram exportados para arquivos no formato KML e apresentados em mapas, com auxílio da ferramenta Google Earth. Conclui-se que, o projeto apresenta alto potencial de uso para cadastro de propriedades agrícolas e dados espacializados e, sua arquitetura é pertinente para o desenvolvimento de projetos geoespaciais, agrícolas em SIG Móvel, que necessitem tratar dados complexos e apresentem alta disponibilidade de dados, tais como: Cadastro Ambiental Rural (CAR); Agricultura de precisão; Controle georreferenciado de dados agrícolas, recursos naturais e urbanização; e Aplicações empresariais de logística.

An increasing amount of companies and organizations are starting to implement the use of cloud computing in their business. This trend results in that software, which was previously sold and distributed to the customers whom then had to install the software on their own computers, now is being replaced with Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS makes software available through the customers’ browsers, which results in that the service providers only have to administer a single application. The process to migrate a distributed application to a service delivered as a SaaS lacks sufficient investigation; this paper will provide some guidelines for conducting such a pro- cess. During the work on this paper, a prototype of a service delivered as a SaaS has been devel- oped with the intention to test, among other things, how a distributed relational database can be converted to a key/value pair storage. A conversion of this kind enables data to be stored locally in the customers’ browsers, which relieves some pressure on the server as well as enables the application to be used in offline-mode. The paper results in three guidelines which should be considered when planning to migrate software to a service delivered as a SaaS with a local data- base; Think before you act, Don’t expose your soul and Size matters. These guidelines describe how a migration process should be planned, when an application is not deemed appropriate to migrate and when a conversion of the database is not appropriate. / Allt fler företag och organisationer börjar implementera användandet av olika molntjänster i sin verksamhet. Den här trenden medför att programvaror, som tidigare sålts och distribuerats till kunder vilka sedan själva får installera dem på sina egna datorer, nu börjar ersättas med en Soft- ware as a Service (SaaS). Det innebär att programvaran istället finns tillgänglig på Internet via kundernas webbläsare, något som medför att tjänsteleverantören enbart behöver administrera en enda programvara. Processen att migrera en distribuerad programvara till en SaaS-tjänst saknar ordentlig utredning, det här arbetet syftar därför till att ta fram några vägledande riktlinjer för en sådan process. Under arbetets gång har en prototyp av en SaaS-tjänst utvecklats med syfte att testa bland annat hur en tidigare distribuerad relationsdatabas kan konverteras till nyckel/värde- par. En sådan konvertering möjliggör lokal lagring av data i kundernas webbläsare, vilket mins- kar belastningen på servern samt erbjuder möjligheten att arbeta offline. Arbetet resulterar i tre riktlinjer att beakta då en migration till en SaaS-tjänst med lokal databas planeras; Tänk efter, före, Blotta inte din själ och Storleken har betydelse. Riktlinjerna beskriver hur en migrations- process bör planeras, när en applikation inte anses lämplig att migrera samt när en konvertering av databasen inte anses lämplig.