Cloud ERP Adoption Opportunities and Concerns: A Comparison between SMES and Large Companies

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 These systems 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 company 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. On the other hand, large companies have severe concerns that are related to their size, complexity and demands. However, we have found that a hybrid solution, in which business critical and sensitive applications are kept on-premise, can allow large companies to settle many of their concerns while at the same time enable them to reap some of the benefits of cloud computing.