Analysis of the Romanian offer of ERP solutions

This article tries to make an analysis of the actual Romanian offer of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solutions. In the first part of the article the level of ERP adoption by Romanian companies having as main sources two studies published in 2006 about the ERP market in Romania, namely: “ERP Romania 2006” by Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) and the second one made by the media company Agora Media and the market research company Sensimark. In the second part of the article a comparative analysis of the first seven best placed ERP products on the Romanian market will be made. In order to accomplish this analysis a synthesized table has been included with all 7 products together with the analysis criteria grouped in three categories: function, technical characteristics, and market segment that it addresses.ERP, accounting software, ERP software provider

Analysis of the Romanian Offer of ERP Solutions

This article tries to make an analysis of the actual Romanian offer of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solutions. In the first part of the article the level of ERP adoption by Romanian companies having as main sources two studies published in 2006 about the ERP market in Romania, namely: "ERP Romania 2006" by Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) and the second one made by the media company Agora Media and the market research company Sensimark. In the second part of the article a comparative analysis of the first seven best placed ERP products on the Romanian market will be made. In order to accomplish this analysis a synthesized table has been included with all 7 products together with the analysis criteria grouped in three categories: function, technical characteristics, and market segment that it addresses.ERP, accounting software, ERP software provider

The IST Cluster: an integrated infrastructure for parallel applications in Physics and Engineering

WOS:000283531600008 (Nº de Acesso Web of Science)The infrastructure to support advanced computing applications at Instituto Superior T´ecnico is presented, including a detailed description of the hardware, system software, and benchmarks, which show an HPL performance of 1.6 Tflops. Due to its decentralized administrative basis, a discussion of the usage policy and administration is also given. The in-house codes running in production are also presented

Development of a server monitoring tool and defining performance thresholds

Today we depend on data based services, for example in logistics, at warehouses, and accounting services. When a data based service is delayed it can depend on its servers being overloaded, leading to economic losses. To prevent this, it is necessary to have appropriate monitoring tools that can make the system administrators aware of when performance thresholds have been breached and servers are reaching a critical state. The focus of this thesis was twofold: to define performance thresholds and to simplify monitoring of critical servers with presentation on a dashboard. As a result of this, two thresholds were produced. A threshold for high CPU utilization which further improved the existing performance thresholds by making the required time for triggering dependent on the current CPU utilization. This proved to give us a better result in 75% of the tested cases compared to the previous model. The second produced threshold was for low CPU utilization. Through studying servers with more allocated resources than they require it was possible to inform the system administrator to disable or reallocate those resources to another server with higher demand for resources. This reduces server costs and improves performance in some cases. The primary intention behind implementing a dashboard was to have a way of presenting when the defined thresholds had been breached. After evaluation of the dashboard through a usability test we came to the conclusion that all end-users were satisfied with the prototype and four out of five considered the dashboard to be a tool which they would use in the near future

Accounting Facilities in the European Supercomputing Grid DEISA

Account management and resource usage monitoring are essential services for production Grids. The scope of a production Grid infrastructure, the heterogeneity of resources and services, the typical community usage profiles, and the depth of integration of the resource providers regarding operational procedures and policies imply specific requirements for accounting facilities. We present the accounting facilities currently used in production in the Distributed European Infra-structure for the Supercomputing Applications (DEISA). DEISA is a consortium of leading national supercomputing centres currently deploying and operating a persistent, production quality, distributed su-percomputing environment with continental scope. The DEISA accounting facilities gather information from the site-local batch systems and the distributed DEISA user administration system, and generate XML usage records conforming to the OGF usage record specification which are then stored locally in a XML data base at each DEISA site. The distributed accounting information can be fetched by clients such as users, project supervisors, site accounting managers and DEISA supervisors. The information is made available by site-local WSRF-compliant accounting information services that allow for a fine-grained setting of access rights. Each authorized client gets a specific view on the accounting information according to one of the following roles: a) a site accounting manager imports usage records of related home-site users from all DEISA sites for longterm archiving, b) a project supervisor retrieves information to assess the resource usage by his project partners, c) a DEISA supervisor (e.g. someone overlooking the usage on behalf of the DEISA executive committee) gets a report on the global usage of DEISA resources, and d) the user who can retrieve all the accounting information related to his own jobs. The privacy and integrity of the data provided and transferred from the accounting information service running at each site is guaranteed using X.509 certificates for mutual authentication and secure communication channels

Does B2C online logistics service quality impact urban logistics?

This paper reports on an in-progress research study regarding the impact of business to consumer (B2C) online logistics service quality (OLSQ) for shopper satisfaction and loyalty on urban logistics across the UK, France and Germany to also investigate country-specific differences of consumer online shopping behaviour and channel strategies. A two-stage approach is adopted consisting of firstly of qualitative research conducted with managers at the producer/retailer interface and secondly a quantitative survey stage targeting consumers as online shoppers to determine how their expectations of OLSQ and associated activities influence their satisfaction and ongoing loyalty. This study should contribute theoretically by considering a B2C setting for OLSQ, which is the final aspect of point-of-origin to point-of-consumption, as most general literature on these topics has been dominated by business to business (B2B) logistical designs, and also identify any discrepancies between consumer expectations or behaviour as it may affect urban logistics solutions. Further, this study should contribute practically by providing managers with an understanding of the components of OLSQ considered critical by consumers

Sources of Resilience in the Computer and Software Industries in France

French hardware manufacturers were by and large incapable not only of translating technological advances into industrial products but even of understanding the new opportunities these advances offered. While true up to a point, this approach, focused on the failure of the so-called ''national champion'' policy, is incapable of explaining why French providers of IT services have had considerable success both in their own domestic market and in the wider European market. The argument advanced is that a very active higher education policy and national research strategy has produced a supply of particularly valuable competences which feed the IT sectors. In addition, the previous mission-oriented policies encouraged the development of effective technological districts which now nurture a plethora of small, innovative IT firms.IT industry dynamics; France; high-skilled labour; SMEs

Host-Based Virtual Networks Management in Cloud Datacenters

Infrastructure management is of key importance in a wide array of computer and network environments. The use of virtualization in cloud datacenters has driven the communications and computing convergence to a common operational entity. Failure to effectively manage the involved infrastructure results as impediments in provisioning a successful service. Information models facilitate the infrastructure management and current solutions can be effectively applied in most datacenter scenarios, apart from cases where the networking architecture relies heavily on systems virtualization. In this paper we propose an information model for managing virtual network architectures, where hypervisors and computing server resources are deployed as the basis of the networking layer. We provide a successful proof of concept by managing a virtual machine-based network infrastructure acting as an IP routing platform using statistical methods. Our proposal enables a dynamic reconfiguration of allocated infrastructure resources adapting, in real-time, to variations in the imposed workload