Author

Faraz Haq,

Degree

Master of Business Administration Executive

Faculty / School

Faculty of Business Administration (FBA)

Year of Award

2017

Project Type

MBA Executive Research Project

Access Type

Restricted Access

Executive Summary

Enterprise business productivity solutions (EBPS) make things easier the way people work, collaborate, share competencies, or to find market trends and business dynamics. It augments user’s personal productivity by bringing unified platform experience across all devices PC, phone, and tablet, thus creating new way to work. EBPS offers better computing through uninterrupted access to productivity apps, improved utilization, enhance business productivity and reduced administrative and infrastructure related costs.

Though EBPS is not new in new as it has been delivered through conventional IT model (Client/Server) for quite some time however the continuous growth of the demand of personal computing for the last 10 years has raised the concerns among enterprises to make it more computing efficient and then came the concept of virtualization which managed to addressed the growing needs of computing power however the dependency on hardware infrastructure was still there so did the arrival of SaaS (Software as a Service) based EBPS. SaaS based EBPS services played a vital role in mitigating upfront hardware and software licensing cost expenditure. Despite EBPS advantages there are some major questions and concerns also raised; one of them is the availability of numerous SaaS based EBPS solutions vendors in the market, each one has its own forte and stack of feature and functionalities, and subscription plans which is why it’s becoming difficult and conftising for an enterprise to choose which one to go with. Secondly, there is some dire concerns regarding the security of the EBPS. This happens because of the data to be put on public cloud which might increase vulnerability and confidentiality of the sensitive data including emails, wikis, profiles, sites and communities, and data repositories. However, major leading EBPS providers namely (IBM, Microsoft, and Google) have come up with one of the best cloud computing services based on international best practices (accredited by international IT standards) which can improve on several key security practices, such as predicting and detecting new threats, providing for quicker remediation, and providing for greater protection against end user breach or corruption, and lost or stolen data.

This research document addresses those concerns by covering the competitive offerings from leading SaaS based EBPS vendors including IBM, Microsoft, Google in terms of features and functionalities, cost and security in realm of real world scenarios and recommends the best practices. The report also recommends which EBPS is suitable for which enterprise keeping an enterprise’s preference into consideration; it may be features and functionalities, cost and security, or both.

The research methodology is based on two sources (Primary, Secondary); for primary, interviews have been conducted based on the series of questions (Questionnaire) with IT professionals while for Secondary research is based on articles/journals, internal portal resources, some international IT best practices providing companies rankings.

Findings and Recommendations are purely based on the data collected from Primary Research

(Questionnaire) and Secondary research (Journals, Articles, Official Websites, Third Party Ratings Agencies) which states that every EBPS has its own strengths and weaknesses and it all depends on an enterprise’s preference, experience, and what solution it’s looking for.

Since the subject is quite niche in terms of research and requires subject matter experts to comment which is why a sample of 50 was taken. The scope of this research is confined to SaaS based EBPS only; Private/Hybrid cloud based computing are not the part of it and will be covered in the future research report.

Pages

47

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