The high-tech industry is rapidly evolving, putting greater pressure on the suppliers for adapting to the dynamic demands of the buyers, which leads to more complex inventory and tertiary vendor management. Focusing on the cloud computing industry, this study investigates how buyer-supplier relationships interact with supply chain complexities and drive the key supply chain performance of the suppliers, what digital analytic tools can help suppliers set up flexible yet effective strategies to better cope with the complexities. We aim to understand the supply chain link between its source the data center infrastructure (suppliers) and the hyperscalers running the cloud computing business (buyers) which is equally as dynamic and important in sustaining the growing cloud industry.
In this research, we analyze how complex and adaptive dynamics of buyer-supplier relationships influence value creation towards data-driven ecosystems. Delineating attributes for supply chain complexities in buyer-supplier relationships, we investigate supply chain performance from a key supplier perspective in the cloud computing industry. We empirically demonstrate the interactive effects of complex, adaptive, and longitudinal buyers-suppliers transactions in digital supply chains and how to deal with different sources of uncertainties. To investigate this, we examined the micro and macro levels of complexity under three different levels of complexity, viz. node, dyad, and network, to understand how each level informs the emergent network behavior and feeds the relationship dynamics. We analyzed a three-year longitudinal analysis of scorecard data, combining an econometric model, to serve as empirical validation.