Understanding why business customers adopt cloud computing in Hong Kong

Cloud computing is an information technology outsourcing service which allows organizations to outsource their information technology infrastructure to third party vendors. Studying the acceptance of cloud computing from the perspective of customers in Hong Kong is the objective of this research, which focuses on the business-to-business (B2B) perception of cloud computing and intends to help cloud service providers to better understand the needs of business customers and to strengthen their strategies in devising or improving plans to promote cloud computing service. The technology acceptance model (TAM) is a widely recognized model for studying adoption behaviour and perception of customers concerning new technology. This research adopts TAM and its extension, TAM2, as a foundation framework. Ten constructs and twelve hypotheses are identified from the 28 questionnaire items in the proposed model, with support from reliability tests in SPSS. Quantitative methodology and cross-sectional research are adopted, with a self-administered questionnaire for primary data collection. Samples are drawn from the population of cloud service participants in the information and communications technology industry. Descriptive analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural model analysis are performed using SPSS and AMOS statistical packages, with positive and supported results for the proposed model. The research findings show that B2B customers generally volunteer to adopt cloud computing, with consideration of corporate image, job relevance and output quality. Perception of usefulness, ease of use and resources also significantly affect their intentions to adopt cloud computing. Cloud service providers could take the perceptions of their customers into account when formulating service provisioning strategies.