Hype or Reality: Will Enterprise Systems as a Service Become an Organizing Vision for Enterprise Cloud Computing in Denmark?

Abstract

Cloud computing is at “the peak of inflated expectations” on the Gartner Hype Cycle from 2010. Service models constitute a layer in the cloud computing model and Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the important service models. Software as a Service provides complete business applications delivered over the web and more specific when delivering enterprise systems (ES) applications such as ERP, CRM and others we can further categorize the model as an Enterprise Systems as a Service (ESaaS) model. However it is said that ESaaS is one of the last frontier for cloud computing due to security risk, downtime and other factors. The hype about cloud computing and ESaaS made us speculate about our local context, Denmark, what are the current situation and how might ESaaS develop. We are asking the question: Will ESaaS become an organizing vision in Denmark? We used empirical data from a database with more than 1150 Danish organizations using ES, informal contacts to vendors etc. The result of our study is very surprising as none of the organizations in the database apply ESaaS although recent information from vendors indicates more than 50 ESaaS implementations in Denmark. We discuss the distance between the community discourse and current status of real ESaaS implementations.