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Gerritsen, Sven (2020) The trust of German companies in U.S. cloud providers from the perspectives of buyers and sellers. DBA thesis, University of Gloucestershire. doi:10.46289/YHPG2720
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Abstract
Building and maintaining successful business relationships between buyers and sellers continues to be of key interest for sales organisations and academics. The positive effect of trust on the buyer’s purchasing behaviour has been proven in multiple studies in the past. However, the digitalisation of business processes and the globalisation of products and services require an additional perspective on this matter. Cloud computing is about to radically change the way that businesses purchase and utilize information technology. It is a catalyst for the disruption of existing business models and for the creation of new products and services. Amongst the various cloud computing deployment models, public cloud computing offers the most benefits for businesses including low investment costs, almost unlimited scalability and multi-geographical availability of IT services. Today, the most advanced public cloud computing services are offered by U.S. technology companies. U.S. cloud providers are, however, subject to U.S. laws and were suspected of allowing the U.S. government to force businesses that have their headquarters in the U.S. to hand over user data to U.S. government authorities, even if the data is stored in a data centre in the EU. The fact that U.S. cloud providers could be forced to disclose private and confidential data to the U.S. government emerged as one of the top concerns among IT managers of German companies. In addition to these legal complications, the disclosures by Edward Snowden around the global surveillance programmes of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) have caused significant distrust of German companies in U.S. cloud services. The objective of the current research was to analyse the perspective of the buyers and sellers on the importance of the concept of trust for German companies for the adoption of public cloud computing services from U.S. cloud providers (RO1a) and on the impact of the cultural differences between Germany and the U.S. (RO1b) as well as the influence of the sector of a German company on trust and public cloud adoption (RO1c). The second objective was to explore the trust relationship between German companies and U.S. cloud products (RO2a), U.S. cloud provider companies (RO2b), the local sales representatives of the U.S. cloud providers (RO2c) and the U.S. government (RO2d). In addition to these theoretical contributions, this study made a contribution to practice by offering some important insights into how U.S. cloud providers can improve their trust relationship with German companies (RO3) and developed a conceptual framework for buyer-seller trust in the context of international public cloud computing services (RO4). A qualitative research methodology was adopted to provide a deep understanding of the properties and the underlying reasons for the (dis-)trust of the key respondents. Semi-structured interviews were conducted for the collection of dyadic data with key informants from German companies from different sectors (buyers) and local sales representatives of U.S. cloud providers (sellers). By applying a constructivist worldview, the findings from this study made several contributions to existing knowledge. Firstly, the present study provides additional evidence with respect to the importance of trust in buyer-seller relationships by demonstrating that trust is a vital component for German companies for adopting public cloud computing services from U.S. cloud providers. This trust is influenced by the cultural background of the buyer and seller as well as the sector the buying company is operating in. Secondly, the current findings add to a growing body of literature on buyer-seller trust including inter-organisational trust, inter-personal trust, product trust and by introducing an additional trust relationship named foreign government trust. This study has demonstrated, for the first time, that foreign government trust had a stronger impact on the buyer’s purchasing behaviour than the three other trust relationships. Thirdly, the empirical findings in this study provide a new understanding of the measures that U.S. cloud providers can take to enhance the trust of their German customers. This includes building cloud data centres in Germany, legal proceedings against the U.S. government, improved cloud computing contracts and strong data encryption standards.
| Item Type: | Thesis (DBA) | |||||||||
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| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Trust; buyer-seller relationships; cloud computing; German companies; U.S. cloud providers; national culture; company trust; salesperson trust; product trust; foreign government trust; global surveillance disclosure | |||||||||
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5001 Business T Technology > T Technology (General) |
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| Divisions: | Schools and Research Institutes > School of Business, Computing and Social Sciences | |||||||||
| Depositing User: | Anne Pengelly | |||||||||
| Date Deposited: | 04 Sep 2026 15:45 | |||||||||
| Last Modified: | 04 Sep 2026 15:46 | |||||||||
| URI: | https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/16503 |
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