Service strategies of small cloud service providers: A case study of a small cloud service provider and its clients in Taiwan

Small enterprises play an important role in the technology innovation and economic development of most countries all over the world, particularly in Taiwan. Due to a lack of financial resources and expertise, small enterprises tend to find novel ways to utilize IT resources in order to reduce IT adoption costs, to achieve better flexibility, business agility and scalability, and to react faster to market demands. Whereas Taiwan has been promoting cloud computing to help Taiwanese enterprises adopt more effective information technologies, we found that the service strategies of small cloud service providers are individually differentiated in order to survive in the competitive cloud computing market. This paper reports a case study of a small e-learning service provider and its four clients in Taiwan. Some novel insights are revealed through this case study and recommendations are provided accordingly. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.