Evaluating the App-Store Model for Enterprise Application Software and Related Services

Spurred by the overwhelming success of mobile “app stores”, enterprise software vendors are increasingly embracing the use of online sales channels. Whereas organizational buying behavior has already been investigated with regard to the acquisition of enterprise software via traditional offline channels, researchers have not yet focused on its provision using an electronic sales channel. In this explorative study, we laid the first bricks to fill this research gap and provided valuable insight to practitioners confronting this marketing innovation. Relying on a qualitative research strategy, we assessed the extent to which an electronic sales channel may support the different phases of a generic software buying process, and the impact of product characteristics on enterprise customers’ channel adoption. We identified a set of adoption drivers and barriers which ought to be taken into account by channel providers, and elicited technological and organizational solutions from the interviews

SMiT: Local System Administration Across Disparate Environments Utilizing the Cloud

System administration can be tedious. Most IT departments maintain several (if not several hundred) computers, each of which requires periodic housecleaning: updating of software, clearing of log files, removing old cache files, etc. Compounding the problem is the computing environment itself. Because of the distributed nature of these computers, system administration time is often consumed in repetitive tasks that should be automated. Although current system administration tools exist, they are often centralized, unscalable, unintuitive, or inflexible. To meet the needs of system administrators and IT professionals, we developed the Script Management Tool (SMiT). SMiT is a web-based tool that permits administration of distributed computers from virtually anywhere via a common web browser. SMiT consists of a cloud-based server running on Google App Engine enabling users to intuitively create, manage, and deploy administration scripts. To support local execution of scripts, SMiT provides an execution engine that runs on the organization’s local machines and communicates with the server to fetch scripts, execute them, and deliver results back to the server. Because of its distributed asynchronous architecture SMiT is scalable to thousands of machines. SMiT is also extensible to a wide variety of system administration tasks via its plugin architecture

Mobile Application Security Platforms Survey

Nowadays Smartphone and other mobile devices have become incredibly important in every aspect of our life. Because they have practically offered same capabilities as desktop workstations as well as come to be powerful in terms of CPU (Central processing Unit), Storage and installing numerous applications. Therefore, Security is considered as an important factor in wireless communication technologies, particularly in a wireless ad-hoc network and mobile operating systems. Moreover, based on increasing the range of mobile application within variety of platforms, security is regarded as on the most valuable and considerable debate in terms of issues, trustees, reliabilities and accuracy. This paper aims to introduce a consolidated report of thriving security on mobile application platforms and providing knowledge of vital threats to the users and enterprises. Furthermore, in this paper, various techniques as well as methods for security measurements, analysis and prioritization within the peak of mobile platforms will be presented. Additionally, increases understanding and awareness of security on mobile application platforms to avoid detection, forensics and countermeasures used by the operating systems. Finally, this study also discusses security extensions for popular mobile platforms and analysis for a survey within a recent research in the area of mobile platform security

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

Дослідження системи операційного менеджменту організації, на прикладі Apple Computer, Inc

The object of investigation is the process of managing of operating activities of Apple, Inc. The aim of the work is to formulate theoretical approaches and to develop practical recommendations on directions of improvement of operating management at the organization. Research methods cover methods of analysis, synthesis, comparison, detailing, system approach. This master’s research paper analyzes the operational management of Apple, Inc. and provides recommendations for it’s improvement. In particular, the main directions of solving the problems of operational management of the company have been outlined, the proposals on improvement of expansion distribution network and organization of innovative activity of the Apple Inc. have been made.Об'єкт дослідження ‒ процес управління операційною діяльністю компанії Apple, Inc. Мета дослідження - формування теоретичних підходів та розробка практичних рекомендацій щодо напрямів вдосконалення системи операційного менеджменту компанії Apple, Inc. Методи дослідження: методи аналізу, синтезу, порівняння, деталізації, системний підхід. У роботі проведено аналіз операційного менеджменту Apple, Inc., а також викладені рекомендації щодо його вдосконалення. Зокрема, окреслено основні напрями вирішення проблем операційного менеджменту компанії, внесено пропозиції щодо розширення дистриб’юторської мережі, а також вдосконалення організації інноваційної діяльності Apple Inc.Introduction 6 CHAPTER 1 THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT 8 1.1 Meanings and definition of operational management 8 1.2 Principles and methods of operations management 12 1.3 Factors affecting the Operations activity of Apple Inc. company 21 CHAPTER 2 RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS 31 2.1 Сompany introduction 31 2.2 SWOT - analysis of Apple Inc. Company 46 2.3 Analysis of operation management at Apple Inc 50 CHAPTER 3 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR IMPROVING OF OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT AT THE APPLE INC 63 3.1 The main directions of solving operational management problems of the company 63 3.2 Recommendations concerning improvements of Distribution in the organization 65 3.3 Recommendations concerning improvements of innovative activity at the organization 67 CHAPTER 4 SPECIAL PART 73 4.1 Current trends in the field 73 4.2 Company policy in the market 75 CHAPTER 5 RATIONALE FOR RECOMMENDATIONS 77 5.1 Statement for recommendations at Company 77 CHAPTER 6 OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY AT THE ENTERPRISE 79 6.1 The aim of occupational health 79 6.2 Organization of occupational health and safety at the enterprise 86 CHAPTER 7 ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES 92 7.1 Environmental issues in the field 92 7.2 Еnvironmental factors 94 Conclusions 96 References 98 Appendices 10

ClouNS - A Cloud-native Application Reference Model for Enterprise Architects

The capability to operate cloud-native applications can generate enormous business growth and value. But enterprise architects should be aware that cloud-native applications are vulnerable to vendor lock-in. We investigated cloud-native application design principles, public cloud service providers, and industrial cloud standards. All results indicate that most cloud service categories seem to foster vendor lock-in situations which might be especially problematic for enterprise architectures. This might sound disillusioning at first. However, we present a reference model for cloud-native applications that relies only on a small subset of well standardized IaaS services. The reference model can be used for codifying cloud technologies. It can guide technology identification, classification, adoption, research and development processes for cloud-native application and for vendor lock-in aware enterprise architecture engineering methodologies

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history