Cloud ERP Adoption Opportunities and Concerns: The Role of Organizational Size

Cloud computing has become one of the fastest growing segments of the IT industry. In the wake of this, cloud based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have emerged as an alternative to traditional ERPs. The marketing of cloud based ERPs states that adoption require low upfront investments and can rapidly be deployed, as they are provided over the cloud. In this study we seek to unravel cloud ERP adoption by identifying and classifying opportunities and concerns often associated with cloud ERPs with respect to organizational size. Our results show that SMEs, and in particular small companies, can best exploit cloud ERPs as many of the benefits are more relevant for them. At the same time, many of the concerns associated with cloud ERPs are not seen as important for SMEs. Large organizations on the other hand, have severe concerns related to size, in the form of complexity and specific demands. However, in the study we found that a hybrid solution, following a best-of-breed approach in which business critical and sensitive applications are kept on-premise, can allow large organizations to settle many of their concerns while at the same time enable them to gain some benefits of cloud computing.