Last Thursday, Prof. Christine Legner gave a talk about the emerging cloud solutions for service management at the Service Congress in Munich, a large German conference with more than 400 participants. Our research reveals different types and forms of “Service Clouds” – from migrating the CRM system to the cloud (CRM-as-a-Service) to more specialized cloud solutions integrating mobile / Web apps with the existing backend systems (Mobile integration-as-a-Service).

Reactions were controversial: Some service managers see clear benefits due to the process improvements and transparency, as well as the cloud solution’s accessibility, intuitive design and pay-per-use model. Others raised security and performance concerns as inhibitors of cloud solutions. Luckily, “Service Cloud” users report positive experiences, such as Vaillant (one of the award winners of the conference with their Salesforce.com based cloud solution) or Wolffkran (mobile apps and integration based on the Coresuite cloud).