Investigating Cloud ERP Challenges in Public Universities in the Middle East “Field Study”

ERP is a concept that has been around for some time, and such as any other field; it is inevitable for ERP to find new ways to cope with the huge changes in Information Systems world. One of the new ideas was to facilitate ERP through cloud computing systems; in order to fulfil the staggering raise in service requests from ERP customers due to infrastructure and technology advancement. Google, SAP, INFOR and other ERP service providers has already adopted the idea of providing ERP services through the cloud, in order to attract more business, in particular the more expanding and demanding segment of small and medium enterprises (SME’s). We, on the other hand would like to study the challenges and opportunities of cloud ERP in educational enterprises; public universities in specific. Hussain (7) has mentioned these challenges; we will expand that by validating the challenges alongside providing an ordered view of them, a survey amongst wide sample of public universities in the Middle East will investigate further challenges that could ascend along application of Cloud ERP, and classify them in orderly fashion. Which eventually we think it will help public universities to further more understand how to benefit from cloud ERP.