Internationalisation in the Cloud. An explorative case study into the foreign market expansion of SaaS providers

Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,0, Copenhagen Business School (Department of Intercultural Communication and Management), language: English, abstract: This thesis investigates the internationalisation complexities of cloud technology vendors. To enhance the understanding of foreign market expansion of cloud providers, this study sought to answer the overarching research questions: how do cloud providers internationalise and is available literature to date still relevant for cloud technology vendors? The researchers utilised a single case study of NN, an expanding Danish cloud SME, to provide indepth insights for the business literature realm which has so far attracted scarce research. Literature has focused almost exclusively on SMEs, MNCs and born globals, but cloud providers were mostly ignored. To date, little systematic investigations have considered that the dynamics and processes of internationalisation significantly change in a cloud context. The most important contribution is a research model encompassing twelve moderator variables impacting the performance of cloud firms. Their suggested influence was drawn from a thorough theoretical analysis of contemporary internationalisation literature from the 1950s to the present day. Thereby both versions of the Uppsala Model of Internationalisation by Johanson and Vahlne (1977, 2009) were selected as suitable to provide structure for the research model, namely the process model and the network model. Complementing the four categories of the Uppsala Model, the research model was enhanced with two additional categories so as to examine cloud vendor internationalisation. Using a sample of five employees who are directly responsible for internationalisation activities of the case company NN, this thesis offers interesting insights into the complexities of cloud internationalisation. The findings illustrate that internationalisation literature to date is still useful for examining internationalisation performance, and in particular the network model. However, since cloud vendors mainly operate virtually, this brings forth many advantages and disadvantages which have previously not been considered. Theoretical contributions and implications for future research are discussed. This thesis provides support for ten out of twelve items and offers various compelling areas for future research.