Background: The intense growth of data that is continuously expanding has resulted in SMEs using cloud computing to store, process and analyze data. Thus, a critical element is for SMEs to understand the value of cloud computing and the factors influencing the adoption decision.  Problem: Due to the increased use of cloud computing, the importance of examining the factors that can affect and impact SMEs adoption has been highlighted. Cloud computing has been pointed out as a component for SMEs to stay competitive and sustainable in public crises and uncertain environments. Despite the importance among scholars, no research has studied cloud adoption factors among SMEs during 2020 - 2021 and the present of a public crisis. Purpose: The purpose of this research is to investigate and explore SMEs cloud computing adoption factors in the turbulent time of a public crisis. The result of this research is expected to add knowledge and theoretical insights to existing literature and fill the gap within the underexplored context of cloud computing adoption factors during public crisis. Method: In this research, a qualitative research design was applied where six semi-structured interviews with people experienced of the phenomenon under study were conducted and eight customer cases with cloud users were collected from cloud providers' websites. Conclusion: The findings of this research declared ten significantly important factors; complexity, compatibility, relative advantage, cost savings, security, top management support, technology readiness, organizational culture, competition and trading partner pressure and supplier computing support, to influence SMEs cloud computing adoption. Although this research was conducted during the time of a public crisis, no conclusion of the crisis' impact on which factors influencing SMEs cloud computing adoption could be recognized.

Innovation is an integral part of every product development and therefore also important for ”Software as a Service” (SaaS) companies. However, as these companies do not develop for one customer in particular, it may be difficult to understand what features are to be developed in the future. Co-Innovation can be a solution. Co-Innovation proposes a collaboration between two companies for the benefit of both. In the case of SaaS, the other company can be a customer company. The cooperation between the two gives the SaaS company the opportunity to understand what features are wished for by the customer and the customer company gets a more customised software, that fulfills their requirements. This poses the research question: How could a framework for a Co-Innovation project between a SaaS provider and its customers look like? This study aims to answer this question by means of a case-study and by proposing a comprehensive framework for a Co-Innovation project. The proposed framework offers valuable insights and comprises four essential parts. Part one are the Roles involved in the Co-Innovation project. Part two is a Checklist used to evaluate possible Co-Innovation partners. Part three is an EPC process model outlines the step-by-step implementation of the aforementioned Checklist. Part four is a Gantt process that provides a detailed timeline of daily activities during the Co-Innovation project. By presenting this framework, the study answers the research question by offering a comprehensive description of how a Co-Innovation project can be executed, which can be readily adopted by diverse B2B-SaaS providers. Future research exploring the adaptation of this framework to other industries and types of companies holds promise for further advancements in the field.

[pt] Este trabalho apresenta uma estratégia de modelagem colaborativa na web através do protocolo de comunicação em rede WebSocket. Para compreender a relevância e identificar possíveis lacunas sobre o tema, foi realizada uma investigação acerca do estado da arte de aplicações web colaborativas por meio de uma revisão sistemática da literatura. Para demonstrar a estratégia proposta, foi desenvolvida uma prova de conceito utilizando as linguagens de programação JavaScript e Python. A prova de conceito possui uma arquitetura cliente-servidor, na qual o cliente se comunica com o servidor, sendo este responsável por hospedar a estrutura de dados topológica da aplicação permitindo a criação de modelos bidimensionais de elementos finitos. Devido o canal de comunicação bilateral fornecido pelo WebSocket, é possível a colaboração entre diversos usuários em salas virtuais que compartilham o mesmo modelo em tempo real. Ao final, é realizada uma avaliação da usabilidade da aplicação para verificar a estratégia proposta e encontrar possíveis limitações. / [en] This work presents a collaborative modeling strategy on the web through the WebSocket network communication protocol. To understand the relevance and identify possible gaps on the subject, an investigation was carried out on the state of the art of collaborative web applications through a systematic review of the literature. To demonstrate the proposed strategy, a proof of concept was developed using the JavaScript and Python programming languages. The proof of concept has a client-server architecture, in which the client communicates with the server, which is responsible for hosting the application s topological data structure, allowing the creation of two-dimensional finite element models. Due to the two-way communication channel provided by WebSocket, the collaboration between several users in virtual rooms that share the same model in real-time is possible. In the end, an evaluation of the usability of the application is carried out to verify the proposed strategy and find possible limitations.

This Master's Thesis compares technologies used in the architecture of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems to evaluate the benefits and advantages of emerging technologies. The emerging technologies, Cloud Computing, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Multi-Tenancy, could significantly alter the current ERP space and become a primary part of ERP Systems of the future. A survey was sent to industry professionals to obtain feedback on their company's ERP Systems and to collect their comments on these new technologies. The survey results and related analysis show that Emerging Cloud ERP Systems outperform Traditional Legacy ERP Systems in all important characteristics - Accessibility, Business Cost, Implementation Time, Mobility, Scalability, Upgradability, and Usability. Cloud Systems were also found to have a shorter implementation time and a larger proportion of Cloud Systems were on the most recent version of software. Furthermore, industry professionals identified Cloud Computing, SaaS and Mobility as the emerging technologies of the coming decade. This thesis demonstrates that there are significant benefits for companies to use ERP Systems that use the emerging technologies and that the shift to Cloud ERP Systems has begun.

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.

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.

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.

The thesis introduces a study about the vulnerabilities that a company as Scania IT faces towards vendor lock-in in the transition to a cloud computing platform. Cloud computing is a term that refers to anetwork of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage and process data, rather than on a local server or a personal computer. Vendor lock-in is an outcome that causes companies to pay a significant cost to move between cloud providers. The effects that cause vendor lock-in that will be described are portability, interoperability and federation are called the lock-in effects. The goal of the research is to help Scania IT understand the vendor lock-in and the vulnerabilities they can face in the transition to the cloud as well as to clarify the concern that they may have against falling in vendor lock-in. The main purpose of the research is to present the various lock-in effects that are related to the transition from one cloud provider to another and the vulnerabilities that cause companies to fall in vendor lock-in. The thesis presents the reasons that motivates why Scania IT would consider using the cloud and the concerns that they may have against usage of a cloud computing platform. The results will be based on a case study of a similar company that has moved to a cloud provider and specifically Microsoft Azure and an interview of Microsoft Azure point of view with the risk of vendor lock-in. Finally, a process of interviews with different people from Scania IT to extract the current bottleneck in the development process that caused the company to think of a cloud computing platform. The results show that companies should consider many risks and factors while moving to the cloud, as vendor lock-in, cloud maturity index and their IT strategies. As a result, the thesis gives recommendations of the steps needed to minimize the risks of the cloud while maintaining the positivity of the cloud. / Uppsatsen presenterar en studie om de sårbarheter som ett företag som Scania IT har mot inlåsning i övergången till molntjänster. Molntjänster är en term som hänvisar till ett nätverk av servrar som finns på internet för att lagra, hantera och processa data, istället för på en lokal server eller en persondator. Inlåsning är ett resultat i vilket orsakar att företagen behöver betala en betydande kostnad för att flytta mellan molnleverantörer. De effekter som orsakar inlåsning vilket kommer att beskrivas är portabilitet, interoperabilitet och federation, dessa kallas inlåsningseffekter. Målet med forskningen är att hjälpa Scania IT att förstå inlåsning och sårbarheter som de kan möta i övergången till molnet. Dessutom är målet att klarlägga riskerna som de kan ha mot att falla i inlåsning. Det huvudsakliga syftet med forskningen är att presentera de olika inlåsningseffekter som är relaterade till övergången från en molnleverantör till en annan samt de sårbarheter som orsakar företagen att falla i inlåsning. Uppsatsen presenterar skäl som motiverar varför Scania IT ska överväga att använda molnet samt den oro som de kan ha mot användning av en molnleverantör. Resultaten kommer att baseras på en fallstudie av ett liknande företag som har flyttat till en molnleverantör och specifikt Microsoft Azure samt en intervju av Microsoft Azure synvinkel med risken för inlåsning. Slutligen, en rad av intervjuer med olika personer från Scania IT för att extrahera den nuvarande flaskhalsen i utvecklingsprocessen som orsakade företaget att tänka på molntjänster. Resultaten visar att företagen bör överväga många risker och faktorer när de flyttar till molnet, som exempelvis inlåsning, cloud maturity index och deras IT-strategier. Som ett resultat ger examensarbetet nödvändiga rekommendationer för att minimera riskerna för molnet samtidigt som positivitet av molnet.

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.