A framework for SaaS software packages evaluation and selection with virtual team and BOCR of analytic network process

Software packages evaluation and selection is one of the most important activities encountered by software as a service (SaaS) users in the high performance networked computing environment, especially for the small or medium-sized enterprises. In this paper, we propose a framework for SaaS software packages evaluation and selection by combining the virtual team (VT) and the BOCR (benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks) of the analytic network process (ANP). Different from the traditional application of the BOCR model of ANP, the proposed VT-BOCR model attempts to solve the complex ANP model and overloaded pairwise comparisons by decomposing the tasks to four parts, and performed by benefits virtual team (B-VT), opportunities virtual team (O-VT), costs virtual team (C-VT), and risks virtual team (R-VT) separately. The interactive networked media on distributed environments not only makes the proposed framework possible without the limitations of time, space, and human resources, but also can take full advantage of the talent experts who are geographically dispersed. The proposed framework also shows great potentials for aiding practitioners and researchers concerned with the cloud services.