CORE framework for evaluating the reliability of SaaS products

Abstract

SaaS is revolutionizing the way of software delivery. Numerous tangible and intangible benefits of SaaS adoption enable organizations to reduce costs, increase efficiency, leverage latest technology without additional investment, enhance concentration on core business processes and enhance innovation. This inspires more users especially the Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) to adopt SaaS for their business operations. Service providers have come up with wide array of SaaS products to meet the customer demands. However, a plethora of factors involved in pre-SaaS evaluation process and availability of several products for a single business operation makes it difficult for customers to choose the best reliable product for their business requirements. A tool to perform customer perspective based reliability evaluation of single product or comparative reliability based ranking of multiple products is currently not available. This issue has been addressed in the present research work and a Customer Oriented Reliability Evaluation (CORE) framework is proposed. AHP, one of the MCDM methods is used in the framework which accepts the comparative attribute preferences and assigns their weights, based on which the reliability values are calculated. The CORE framework facilitates customers to perform efficient SaaS product decision making process based on business requirement and their attribute preferences. The framework also helps providers to understand their product position and the expectations of the customers.