Hype or Reality: Will Enterprise Systems as a Service become an Organizing Vision for Enterprise Cloud Computing in Denmark?

Abstract. Cloud computing is at “the peak of inflated expectations” on the Gartner Hype Cycle from 2010. Service models constitute a layer in the cloud computing model and Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the important ser-vice models. Software as a Service provides complete business applications de-livered over the web and more specific when delivering enterprise systems (ES) applications such as ERP, CRM and others we can further categorize the model as an Enterprise Systems as a Service (ESaaS) model. However it is said that ESaaS is one of the last frontier for cloud computing due to security risk, down-time and other factors. The hype about cloud computing and ESaaS made us speculate about our local context, Denmark, what are the current situation and how might ESaaS develop. We are asking the question: Will ESaaS become an organizing vision in Denmark? We used empirical data from a database with more than 1150 Danish organizations using ES, informal contacts to vendors etc. The paper draws on institutional theory extended by the work of Swanson and Ramiller from 1997 about their concept of an organizing vision. The result of our study is very surprising as none of the organizations in the database ap-ply ESaaS although recent information from vendors indicate more than 50 ESaaS implementations in Denmark. We discuss the distance between the community discourse and current status of real ESaaS implementations.