Developing an explorative model for SaaS adoption

Among several types of “cloud services”, the Software as a Service (SaaS) solution is promising. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and its modified versions have been popularly utilized for examining how users come to accept a new technology, but have not yet been employed to handle issues regarding SaaS adoption. This paper attempts to develop an explorative model that examines important factors affecting SaaS adoption, in order to facilitate understanding with regard to adoption of SaaS solutions. An explorative model using partial least squares (PLS) path modeling is proposed and a number of hypotheses are tested, which integrate TAM related theories with additional imperative constructs such as marketing effort, security and trust. Thus, the findings of this study can not only help enterprise users gain insights into SaaS adoption, but also help SaaS providers obtain inspiration in their efforts to discover more effective courses of action for improving both new product development and marketing strategy.

► The use of cloud services is a ground breaking alternative that may enable organizations to focus on their businesses.
► Whether or not to make use of cloud services has become an important issue, with profound consequences for the improvement of IT performance for organizations.
► To address this issue, this paper proposes an explorative model that integrates Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) related theories with imperative constructs.