Software As A Service (SAAS) Adoption for fhe Development Of SMEs

The output of this research is framework that informs the adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) for Small and middle-sized businesses (SMEs). Recent research has shown that there are significant advantages of SaaS when adopted by SMEs. The author investigated SMEs in different sectors on a weighting proposal. This target was 87% in excess of the required minimum of 200 respondents as required by Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) which was done using SPSS AMOS focused on modeling, trimming and best fit. However 293 respondents were obtained, which was significantly above the minimum requirement. The findings indicated that the factors that significantly influence the adoption of SaaS by SMEs include: awareness, trust, prior IT experience, relative advantage, triability, ICT knowledge and skills, top level management support and complexity. The researcher was able to recommend firstly, that evaluation of the market is critical for SaaS deployment and finally, that application developers, technological consultants, software vendors, and policy makers that intend to adopt SaaS should consider the extended TOE model developed from this research.

Dr. Collins Oduor has a PhD degree in Information Systems from the University of Nairobi (SCI) and currently a computer science lecturer at Africa Nazarene University. Collins has been active in Research,ICT Consultancy and Community service. He is also an external examiner for the Inter University Council of East Africa and UNES consultant.