An Empirical Analysis of an Organizational Continuum in a Japanese Accounting Cloud Service

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to clarify an organizational continuum of a technological platform development in a Japanese accounting cloud service. The authors continuously have been studying an accounting cloud service, which adopts two-sided markets structure and freemium business model. As the results, the authors obtain three findings. First, the Japanese accounting cloud service, which runs its business with regional banks in retail banking, has been exploiting its platform into partners' customers. Second, it has been building up from a supply-chain platform to an industrial platform in four years since its entrepreneurship. Third, it has been transforming its cloud-to-cloud service connections from weak-tied interfaces to its own strong-tied interfaces. Therefore, starting-up cloud service providers should not only utilize weak-ties to establish a structural hole, but also should develop its own strong-ties and indirect ties to tighten upon its two-sided markets structure in its cloud ecosystem.