Now showing 1 - 10 of 26
  • Publication
    Grid and Cloud Computing : A Business Perspective on Technology and Applications
    (Springer, 2010) ;
    Wozniak, Thomas
    ;
    Ristol, Santi
    In today's dynamic business environment, IT departments are under permanent pressure to meet two divergent requirements: to reduce costs and to support business agility with higher flexibility and responsiveness of the IT infrastructure. Grid and Cloud Computing enable a new approach towards IT. They enable increased scalability and more efficient use of IT based on virtualization of heterogeneous and distributed IT resources. This book provides a thorough understanding of the fundamentals of Grids and Clouds and of how companies can benefit from them. A wide array of topics is covered, e.g. business models and legal aspects. The applicability of Grids and Clouds in companies is illustrated with four cases of real business experiments. The experiments illustrate the technical solutions and the organizational and IT governance challenges that arise with the introduction of Grids and Clouds. Practical guidelines on how to successfully introduce Grids and Clouds in companies are provided.
  • Publication
    Incorporating Supplier Data
    (Springer, 2013) ;
    Dada, Ali
    ;
    ;
    Marx Gómez, Jorge
    Network participation is a crucial factor in order to reap the benefits of a system like OEPI which is based on user-generated content. Therefore, motives for organizations to join the network and contribute content have to be identified in order to develop incentives that can make the network viral. This chapter identifies the organizational and individual motives, develops incentives based on these, and finally presents the basic concept of how network participation can be stimulated.
  • Publication
    Practical Guidelines
    (Springer, 2013) ;
    Dada, Ali
    ;
    ;
    Marx Gómez, Jorge
    Business networks initiatives in the sustainability domain, despite all their advantages, face resistance during their implementation. In fact, the success stories are rare. In the case of environmental product compliance in the automotive industry, the approach of exchanging sustainability data using a network-based Information System has shown its potential with the International Material Data System (IMDS). Nevertheless, such Sustainability Business Networks (SBNs) are not used to their full extend and have not reached a high market penetration in any other industries. Therefore this research analyses the reasons for market adoption of SBNs, and extracts the critical success factors in the application area of product compliance. A ranking of the success factors is established leveraging the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). Finally recommendations are given for a potential market introduction of a SBN like OEPI.
  • Publication
    Value Assessment
    (Springer, 2013) ;
    Dada, Ali
    ;
    ;
    Marx Gómez, Jorge
    This chapter identifies the impact that the OEPI system could have in the four use cases described within the book. To establish the base for further improvements, the challenges common to all use cases are summarized. Availability of data, lack of comparability of data, inflexibility, lack of process integration, and high costs are the main challenges occurring in all use cases. Then, potential benefits and risks are described. Furthermore, these results have been evaluated. The results suggest that the OEPI system has the potential to improve the state of the art in exchanging EPIs in the supply chain by providing a many-to-many solution incorporating data from various data sources. Furthermore, standardization effects, increased speed of data collection, and additional benchmarking and analysis capabilities can be provided, that were not available before or only at high costs. On the other hand, reaching a critical mass of participants, data accuracy and data comparability are challenges that might hinder a widespread adoption of the OEPI system or similar solutions.
  • Publication
    Environmental Reporting
    (Springer, 2013) ; ;
    Dada, Ali
    ;
    ;
    Marx Gómez, Jorge
    Measuring and reporting EPIs is the first step towards increasing the operational environmental performance. Following the principle “do good and talk about it”, companies need to communicate what they have done in order to claim the profits for their efforts. Most companies do report their environmental performance in an annual sustainability report; however, the processes are too slow and costly to enable companies to react to current incidents that might for example threaten their reputation. Furthermore, accurate reporting would require data from outside the company’s borders where most of the creation of net value takes place. This chapter describes the state of the art in environmental reporting, extracts the shortcomings and derives the functional requirements necessary for the fulfillment of this use case in OEPI.
  • Publication
    Grid Value Chains - What is a Grid Solution?
    (Springer, 2010)
    Cuesta, Juan Carlos
    ;
    Luokkanen-Rabetino, Karita
    ;
    ; ;
    Wozniak, Thomas
    As explained in chapter 3 and 5 before, a Grid solution can be provided in several ways: as a Grid-enabled application, as Utility computing or as Software as a Service. Grid-enabled applications in internal IT deployments are specific software applications that utilize in-house Grid infrastructure. Utility computing is referred to as the provision of Grid computing as service on external resources. In a Software as a Service (SaaS) based solution applications run on external servers and are used in a one-to-many model with a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) funding model or a subscription funding model that is based on pre-defined amounts of usage. Thus, Grid solutions vary from simpler Software as a Product (SaaP) cases to more complex SaaS solutions. While the simplest cases might be handled by one or two providers, the more complex cases consist of many kinds of services, resources and capabilities, and the provision of such services almost always require co-operation between several market actors. In other words, a Grid solution is a sum of many interacting market actors that own distinct resources and capabilities needed to create value for the end user. Moreover, the provision of Grid-based services is different from traditional service provisioning, and it is more complex in terms of contractual agreements, licensing models, definition of SLAs, accounting and billing aspects.
    Scopus© Citations 1
  • Publication
    Grid Basics
    (Springer, 2010) ;
    Wozniak, Thomas
    ;
    ;
    Wozniak, Thomas
    The term Grid or Grid Computing implies different technologies, markets and solutions to different people. The meanings associated with the terms range from cluster computing, High Performance Computing (HPC), utility computing, peer-to-peer computing to specific new types of infrastructure. In order to clarify the position, the aim of this chapter is to define and explain Grid Computing. Thereby, the following aspects will be considered Definition of Grid Computing Explanation of Grid Computing Architectures Overview of basic functionalities and components of Grid Computing Overview of advantages and risks associated with Grid Computing Classification of Grids Overview of trends related to Grid Computing such as Service-oriented Computing (SOC), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and Cloud Computing.
    Scopus© Citations 3
  • Publication
    Introduction: Business and Technological Drivers of Grid Computing
    (Springer, 2010) ;
    Wozniak, Thomas
    ;
    ;
    Wozniak, Thomas
    The vision of using and sharing computers and data as utility has been inspired by constantly increasing computing needs faced by researchers in science and can be traced back in the 1960s to the Internet pioneer Licklider (see Berman and Hey 2004). Licklider wrote in his groundbreaking paper (Licklider 1960)1 that computers should be developed “to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs.” But, it was only in the mid 1990s when this vision became reality and the term “Grid Computing” was coined in order to denote a new computing paradigm (Foster et al. 2001). Explained from the user perspective in the most simplest way, Grid Computing means that computing power and resources can be obtained as utility similar to electricity – the user can simply request information and computations and have them delivered to him without necessity to care where the data he requires resides or which computer is processing his request (Goyal and Lawande 2005). From the technical perspective Grid Computing means the virtualization and sharing of available computing and data resources among different organizational and physical domains. By means of virtualization and support for sharing of resources, scattered computing resources are abstracted from the physical location and their specific features and provided to the users as a single resource that is automatically allocated to their computing needs and processes. At the core of Grid Computing therefore are virtualization and virtual centralization as well as availability of heterogeneous and distributed resources based on collaboration among and sharing of existing infrastructures from different organizational domains which together build the computing Grid.
    Scopus© Citations 4