A Study of Factors Affecting the Performance of Collaborative Cloud SaaS Services

Cloud computing is provided on demand service via the internet, allowing users to pay for the service they actually use. Categorized as one kind of cloud computing, SaaS is computing resource and software sharing model with can be accessed via the internet. Based on virtualization technology, SaaS is expected to improve the efficiency and quality of the IT service level and performance in company. Therefore this research limited cloud services to SaaS especially focused on collaborative application service, and attempts to identify the factors which impact the performance of collaboration and intention to use. This study adopts technological factors of cloud SaaS services and factors of task characteristics to explore the determinants of collaborative performance and intention to use. An experimental study using student subjects with Google Apps provided empirical validation for our proposed model. Based on 337 data collected from respondents, the major findings are following. First, the characteristics of cloud computing services such as collaboration support, service reliability, and ease of use have positive effects on perceived usefulness of collaborative application while accessability, service reliability, and ease to use have positive effects on intention to use. Second, task interdependence has a positive effects on collaborative performance while task ambiguity factor has not. Third, perceived usefulness of collaborative application have positive effects on intention to use.