Cloud computing utilisation and the mitigation of barriers to accelerated internationalisation by SMEs from emerging marketing: evidence from Iran and Turkey

Abstract

Over the past few years, the accelerated internationalisation by SMEs from Emerging Markets (EM-SMEs) have been facilitating by the phenomenon of the Cloud Computing. This technology as a new strategic approach has become in the centre of attention of many scholars and pragmatists. Despite prevalent use of Cloud-Computing Utilisation (CCU) and fast-paced growth of using this technology among the EM-SMEs, yet few studies have been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of utilising this new technology to mitigate the internationalisation barriers of the EM-SMEs towards their accelerated internationalisation. Therefore, this research study endeavours to explore the effectiveness of the CCU in mitigation of the EM-SMEs’ internationalisation-barriers towards an accelerated internationalisation. The research survey was conducted online by SurveyMonkey with the use of random and snowball sampling methods for the collection of data from the top managers of 227 SMEs in different industries in two contexts of Iran and Turkey. A quantitative research methodology was conducted with the use of self-administrated questionnaires. In addition, the structural equation modelling (SEM) was used in data analysis by the use of IBM® SPSS® Amos software. The key findings of this research study shed light on the effectiveness of the CCU for the EM-SMEs to accelerate their internationalisation. The findings of this research confirm that the CCU enables the EM-SMEs to mitigate informational, operational, marketing and environmental barriers and consequently this technology enables the EM-SMEs to accelerate their internationalisation. This research study contributes theoretically in both International Business (IB) and Information System (IS) respectively by identifying and classifying the EM-SMEs internationalisation barriers, and by providing and confirming a series of effective the CCU’s solutions to mitigate the EM-SMEs’ internationalisation barriers. Moreover, this research study contributes methodologically by applying the SEM data analysis with the use of AMOS software in order to investigate the effectiveness of the CCU as well as quantifying the magnitude level of EM-SEMs’ integration with CC based on the definition of cloud computing (CC) which has been defined by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, 2011). Furthermore, the empirical outcomes of this research study contribute that the CCU facilitates the EM-SMEs to mitigate their informational, operational, marketing and environmental barriers towards an accelerated internationalisation. Therefore, this research contributes empirically to the EM-SMEs’ decision-makers and the cloud service providers (CSPs) in order to get the most out of this phenomenon.