title

The International Workshop on Software-as-a-Service

The inaugural International Workshop on Software-as-a-Service will be held in conjunction with the ICSOB 2013 conference, at the University of Potsdam.

This workshop aims at advancing and communicating the scientific and industrial research on the type of software provisioning characterized by one-to-many delivery over the Internet. The workshop focuses on economic and business management aspects of the Software-as-a-Service phenomenon, exploring both client and provider standpoints. It will provide researchers and practitioners with a community and forum to contribute, discuss and learn about the latest research results and progress. The first workshop on the topic shall address the current state, unsolved issues and future developments of the SaaS business.

Theme: Current state of the SaaS business

The term Software-as-a-Service was introduced approximately a decade ago, to denote technology enabling one-to-many software provisioning and delivery of software capabilities over the Internet. The term also refers to a type of software system acquisition, where development, deployment and operating have been outsourced, and to a business model characterized by finite value proposition and on-demand revenue logic.

While Software-as-a-Service has distinctive features in terms of both technology and business, so far much more emphasis has been put on research of the technological aspects and on the client perspective. Research on the economic and business management aspects of SaaS has been called for by several scholars. Suggested viewpoints in the literature include pricing and marketing strategies, organizational structures, technology adoption, contractual and regulatory issues, IT business alignment and technology diffusion. Similarly, SaaS entrepreneurs and managers in SaaS firms are keen to learn about the market evolution, competition and best practices in configuring their business models, about functioning marketing and sales channels, as well as about fine-tuning their pricing models software products and service offerings.

The International Workshop on Software-as-a-Service aims to advance the body of knowledge in this multidisciplinary field by providing researchers and practitioners with a community and forum to contribute, discuss and learn about the latest results and progress. The first workshop shall address the current state, unsolved issues and future developments of the SaaS business. The selection of topics intends to offer relevant insights for academia and industry. The main objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners in order to establish and foster industry-academia collaboration. We expect scientific contributions from scholars with their focus in business administration and information systems, as well as software engineering. From the industry, we encourage contributions from entrepreneurs and business managers.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Submissions

We invite full research papers of 12 pages and industry presentations (abstract). Research papers are formatted using Springer LNBIP template.

All submissions must relate to the workshop objective and broad topic coverage. The articles should communicate their content to both scientific and industry audiences. In accordance with academic and professional protocols, the workshop only accepts original articles, which have not been published before, or are currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Accepted full papers will be included in the conference proceedings published by Springer as a volume in Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series.We aim at an acceptance rate of roughly 40 percent (depending on the volume and quality of the submissions).

Program committee