Predicting Purchase Timing, Product Choice, and Purchase Amount for a Firm's Adoption of a Radically Innovative Information Technology: An Analysis of Cloud Computing Services

Cloud computing is a radically innovative information technology IT that has been widely commercialized, but understanding its adoption by a firm has been a mystery. Cloud computing offerings include servers, storage and data product services, and desktop cloud solutions for small businesses. Because prior knowledge about cloud computing adoption is quite limited, this paper attempts to fill the gap in the adoption--provider framework by identifying the drivers that help a firm adopt a radical innovation in a business-to-business scenario. We developed an integrated model that links the purchase timing, product choice, and purchase amount decisions of the different types of cloud computing services. The theory of relationship marketing consisting of “commitment” and “trust” constructs has been extended to include the “need” construct to explain the adoption behavior of the cloud computing services. We empirically tested the proposed framework using data from a large IT company. Results indicate that the proposed model predicts the purchase timing with an accuracy of 78%, type of choice with an accuracy of 81%, and purchase amount with a mean absolute percentage error of 28% for the cloud computing services. The paper highlights the contribution, limitations, and future research for both researchers and practitioners.

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