Iowa Public Television’s Planning Targets 2011-2014

Agency Performance Plan, Iowa Public Televisio

Networking vendor strategy and competition and their impact on enterprise network design and implementation

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; in conjunction with the Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-99).While a significant amount of literature exists that discuss platform strategies used by general IT vendors, less of it has to do with corporate networking technology vendors specifically. However, many of the same strategic principles that are used to analyze general IT vendors can also be used to analyze networking vendors. This paper extends the platform model that was developed by Michael Cusumano and Annabel Gawer to networking vendors, outlining the unique strategic aspects that the networking market possesses. The paper then reviews the strategy of the first dominant corporate datacom vendor, IBM, how it achieved its dominance, and how it lost it. The paper then discusses the strategies of various vendors who attempted to replace IBM as the dominant networking platform vendor and how they failed to do so. Finally, the paper discusses Cisco Systems, a vendor who did manage to achieve a level of dominance that parallels IBM's, and how that company has utilized its strategy to achieve and maintain its current dominance. Finally, Cisco's current strategic challenges are discussed. The impact of the strategies of the various vendors on the evolution of corporate networking is also discussed.by Ray Fung.S.M.M.B.A

A web services choreography scenario for interoperating bioinformatics applications

BACKGROUND: Very often genome-wide data analysis requires the interoperation of multiple databases and analytic tools. A large number of genome databases and bioinformatics applications are available through the web, but it is difficult to automate interoperation because: 1) the platforms on which the applications run are heterogeneous, 2) their web interface is not machine-friendly, 3) they use a non-standard format for data input and output, 4) they do not exploit standards to define application interface and message exchange, and 5) existing protocols for remote messaging are often not firewall-friendly. To overcome these issues, web services have emerged as a standard XML-based model for message exchange between heterogeneous applications. Web services engines have been developed to manage the configuration and execution of a web services workflow. RESULTS: To demonstrate the benefit of using web services over traditional web interfaces, we compare the two implementations of HAPI, a gene expression analysis utility developed by the University of California San Diego (UCSD) that allows visual characterization of groups or clusters of genes based on the biomedical literature. This utility takes a set of microarray spot IDs as input and outputs a hierarchy of MeSH Keywords that correlates to the input and is grouped by Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) category. While the HTML output is easy for humans to visualize, it is difficult for computer applications to interpret semantically. To facilitate the capability of machine processing, we have created a workflow of three web services that replicates the HAPI functionality. These web services use document-style messages, which means that messages are encoded in an XML-based format. We compared three approaches to the implementation of an XML-based workflow: a hard coded Java application, Collaxa BPEL Server and Taverna Workbench. The Java program functions as a web services engine and interoperates with these web services using a web services choreography language (BPEL4WS). CONCLUSION: While it is relatively straightforward to implement and publish web services, the use of web services choreography engines is still in its infancy. However, industry-wide support and push for web services standards is quickly increasing the chance of success in using web services to unify heterogeneous bioinformatics applications. Due to the immaturity of currently available web services engines, it is still most practical to implement a simple, ad-hoc XML-based workflow by hard coding the workflow as a Java application. For advanced web service users the Collaxa BPEL engine facilitates a configuration and management environment that can fully handle XML-based workflow

Gender and Programming Language Preferences of Computer Programming Students at Moraine Valley Community College

The objectives of this study were to answer the following questions: 1. Are female programming students more likely to pursue study in certain programming languages than in other languages? 2. Are females more or less likely to pursue study in multiple programming languages than males? 3. As compared with the percentage of females working as computer programmers nationwide, are females over- or under-represented in certain language tracks at Moraine Valley Community College? 4. Which language(s) might be useful in attracting more females to computer programming and software development

Information sharing architecture using internet\u27s XML and SOAP

Businesses should be able to share information among each other irrespective of the platform, operating systems and programming languages. Using Internet as the Information Systems Architecture has many values. Internet is affordable, easily available and is not tied to any specific vendor. Internet is simple and runs under any kind of operating system. Information sharing across the Internet is challenging but rewarding. Data Transfer using the Internet requires structure and discipline. To integrate diverse group of systems we need specialized protocols that can connect different platforms that use different languages together. Extensible Markup Language enables the creation of application dependent vocabulary which can be used to store data and information in a structured fashion. Simple Object Access Protocol can be used to carry information electronically from one end to the other. Simple Object Access Protocol uses the World Wide Web\u27s extensible Markup Language in encoding the message contents and its Hypertext Transport Protocol in carrying the message packet. This thesis work is focused upon sharing of information among enterprises using extensible Markup Language, Simple Object Access Protocol and decentralized database systems. An online Shopping cart application has been implemented using the notion of XML and SOAP. SOAP is used as a protocol to share information between AsiStore and its business partners Store 1 and Store2. XML have been used as a part of the application to drive the shopping cart, which users can view on the web browser

Government Preferences for Promoting Open-Source Software: A Solution in Search of a Problem

Governments around the world are making or considering efforts to promote open-source software (typically produced by cooperatives of individuals) at the expense of proprietary software (generally sold by for-profit software developers). This article examines the economic basis for these kinds of government interventions in the market. It first provides some background on the software industry. The article discusses the industrial organization and performance of the proprietary software business and describes how the open-source movement produces and distributes software. It then surveys current government proposals and initiatives to support open-source software and examines whether there is a significant market failure that would justify such intervention in the software industry. The article concludes that the software industry has performed remarkably well over the past 20 years in the absence of government intervention. There is no evidence of any significant market failures in the provision of commercial software and no evidence that the establishment of policy preferences in favor of open-source software on the part of governments would increase consumer welfare

A new MDA-SOA based framework for intercloud interoperability

Cloud computing has been one of the most important topics in Information Technology which aims to assure scalable and reliable on-demand services over the Internet. The expansion of the application scope of cloud services would require cooperation between clouds from different providers that have heterogeneous functionalities. This collaboration between different cloud vendors can provide better Quality of Services (QoS) at the lower price. However, current cloud systems have been developed without concerns of seamless cloud interconnection, and actually they do not support intercloud interoperability to enable collaboration between cloud service providers. Hence, the PhD work is motivated to address interoperability issue between cloud providers as a challenging research objective. This thesis proposes a new framework which supports inter-cloud interoperability in a heterogeneous computing resource cloud environment with the goal of dispatching the workload to the most effective clouds available at runtime. Analysing different methodologies that have been applied to resolve various problem scenarios related to interoperability lead us to exploit Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods as appropriate approaches for our inter-cloud framework. Moreover, since distributing the operations in a cloud-based environment is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP-complete) problem, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based job scheduler proposed as a part of interoperability framework, offering workload migration with the best performance at the least cost. A new Agent Based Simulation (ABS) approach is proposed to model the inter-cloud environment with three types of agents: Cloud Subscriber agent, Cloud Provider agent, and Job agent. The ABS model is proposed to evaluate the proposed framework.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - (Referencia da bolsa: SFRH SFRH / BD / 33965 / 2009) and EC 7th Framework Programme under grant agreement n° FITMAN 604674 (http://www.fitman-fi.eu

A blueprint for successful partnering.

Thesis (MBA)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2004.Partnerships have evolved during the last decade from being the 'nice to have' to becoming the 'must have' to survive in all industries across the world. There are many different definitions of 'partnerships' and 'alliances' but most researchers, authors and experts in this field agree that at the core of true partnering or alliance agreements lies shared: benefits, risks and approaches. To avoid market share and profitability deterioration, solutions providers must initiate programs to improve their strategic position in a focused set of partner programs. Microsoft Corporation is the worlds leading software company with 96% of all revenue earned being billed through their partners. The company currently faces poor partner satisfaction ratings and has come to the realisation in that they have to a large extent, ignored the needs of their strategic and 'managed' partners. A blueprint for successful partnering is key to any company looking to differentiate itself, create a competitive advantage and become the industry leader in the offering the 'best of breed' partner experience. This is why the identification and implementation of a defined, successful partnering agreement blueprint is required in order to drive the Microsoft business strategy around the 'Partner' experience forward. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the current Microsoft engagement models in driving partner satisfaction in the managed partner space, to determine what the barriers and best practices are, pertaining to successful partnering in the corporate arena and to establish if it is feasible to identify and implement a blueprint that can be used in the corporate arena that promotes successful alliances/partnerships. Recommendations to implement the said blueprint are also be made in order to guide readers through the process