259,688 research outputs found
Ready, willing and capable How can SMEs gain competitive advantage from using Internet-based technologies? Ready, willing and capable How can SMEs gain competitive advantage from using Internet-based technologies?
SMEs can potentially gain competitive advantage from Internet-based technologies, because these require less investment and are more flexible than traditional Information Technologies. However, availability of IT resources is not enough. Organisations need particular competencies in order to deploy their resources effectively. Strategic application of these competencies can than lead to distinct organisational capabilities which provide competitive advantages. This paper presents a case study of a small organisation that was keen to exploit the potential of Internet-based technologies to help them compete in a very tough environment. It was found that Internet-based technologies enabled tactical quick-wins and hold the promise of potential strategic benefits through the creation of distinctive IT resources. However, it was shown that there was a need to develop competencies, particularly around capturing business needs as well as vendor management, before strategic capabilities could be realised. As SMEs have to be responsive to dynamic environments, these competencies and capabilities need to be enhanced and maintained by embedding IS management in overall management processes
InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services
Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different
geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of
their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support
mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among
different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for
hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the
Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of
users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen
automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes
in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud
computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time,
opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently
achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions.
The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic
expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database)
for handling sudden variations in service demands.
This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of
InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The
proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across
multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of
rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results
demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it
offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost
saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape
An Electronic Performance Support System (EPSS) for Natural Resource Planning: Making the Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) System Interactive
End-users in academe, as well as in professional practice, are increasingly looking toward advances in distance education to improve learning opportunities for students and staff. The Internet has provided one medium for delivering information to global users in a dynamic environment. Unfortunately, the restrictions of the Internet (in terms of server connectivity, bandwidth type, and data processing capabilities, etc.) often limit the flexibility for delivering and working with large multimedia and interactive files. An alternative platform to the Internet is the digital video disk (DVD), which is capable of storing, delivering, and processing large pieces of information almost instantaneously and without the system requirements of the Internet. This presentation will demonstrate the application of an electronic performance support system (EPSS), delivered via DVD, to wilderness planning using the Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) system
Yahoo! : the end of the banner years
Yahoo! was in the late nineties the most profitable and successful internet company on the web. However, after the burst of the dotcom bubble, its competitive position changed dramatically as the banner advertising format, the center of its advertising-based business model, entered in decline. This dissertation uses dynamic capabilities to explain the failure of Yahoo! to respond to that change in the environment. For that purpose, we develop and analyze in detail a teaching case covering Yahoo!’s history from 1994 to 2007. As we succeed to explain the failure of Yahoo! as caused by a low level of dynamic capabilities, we conclude that the company had a low propensity to sense opportunities and threats, to make timely decisions and to make market-oriented decisions. We further identify problems in Yahoo!’s propensity to change its resource base that we classify as medium-low. Its low level of dynamic capabilities led Yahoo! to ignore the potential of search as a business and the emergence of keywords advertising as the dominant format of online advertising. Yahoo! reacted late and failed to transform its resource base in an effective manner to respond to those changes. These events still impact Yahoo!’s performance today
Recommended from our members
Multimedia delivery in the future internet
The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio
and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks,
like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white
paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked
challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet.
Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted
with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning
media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace
of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more
than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so
regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected
to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising
to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged
that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new)
multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized
way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety.
In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe
network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as
community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of
interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and
innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/
media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content
combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P
networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to
contribute towards such a vision.
Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6)
and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily
contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way
ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms
Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements
Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s)
Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms
The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications
Towards engineering ontologies for cognitive profiling of agents on the semantic web
Research shows that most agent-based collaborations
suffer from lack of flexibility. This is due to the fact that
most agent-based applications assume pre-defined
knowledge of agents’ capabilities and/or neglect basic
cognitive and interactional requirements in multi-agent
collaboration. The highlight of this paper is that it brings
cognitive models (inspired from cognitive sciences and HCI)
proposing architectural and knowledge-based requirements
for agents to structure ontological models for cognitive
profiling in order to increase cognitive awareness between
themselves, which in turn promotes flexibility, reusability
and predictability of agent behavior; thus contributing
towards minimizing cognitive overload incurred on humans.
The semantic web is used as an action mediating space,
where shared knowledge base in the form of ontological
models provides affordances for improving cognitive
awareness
- …