How will Software as a service impact organization?

Software as a service is a somewhat new business tool that it is changing the software industry in a rapid and increasingly way. Renting the software instead of own it has many advantages, for example: you do not need to install all the applications that come with the software into your computer, saving you space and giving you a high level of customization. With a little to invest and maintain, the SaaS model is one of the best options to a company that could be new to business in the web.

We believe that SaaS is going to have a major impact on the software industry, because software as a service will change the way people build, sell, buy, and use software. Hotmail is a good example that comes to mind when you think about SaaS, it meets all of the basic criteria: a vendor hosts all of the program logic and data, and provides end users with access to this data over the public Internet, through a Web-based user interface ( Frederick Chong and Gianpaolo Carraro, Microsoft Corporation, April 2006, Para 1).

    

Another example is, ford when their cars are out of warranty, and the vehicle needs an upgrade they charge about $50 to $95 dollars to install an upgrade on the cars computer and fix any issue that the car may have, in others words they are providing a software as a service, on a need bases. If they could offer this upgrade online, for a less rate, it would simplify the process, improved costumer trust in the brand and it would drive more costumers to the dealers to buy cars and to get help from professionals to fix their cars. Other examples are my complab, blackboard, avg back up, facebook, and oracle.

 

With the software-as-a-product model providing the context for the software market, the idea of software as a service can feel somewhat alien: instead of "owning" important software outright, customers are told, they can pay for a subscription to software running on someone else's servers, software that goes away if they stop subscribing. It is therefore especially important that the prospective customer understand how SaaS provides a direct and quantifiable economic benefit over the traditional model (Frederick Chong and Gianpaolo Carraro, Microsoft Corporation, April 2006, Para 21).

With this, the organizations can take advantage of SaaS and offer inexpensive alternative to costumers, opening a wide market opportunity. Using this model will prove more effective ways to reach users, offering a unique product, affordable, and ready to fit each user needs.

 

 

In a decentralized authentication system, the tenant deploys a federation service that interfaces with the tenant's own user directory service. When an end user attempts to access the application, the federation service authenticates the user locally and issues a security token, which the SaaS provider's authentication system accepts and allows the user to access the application( Frederick Chong and Gianpaolo Carraro, Microsoft Corporation, April 2006, Para 26).

 

 

Reference list:

Building Distributed Applications Architecture Strategies for Catching the Long Tail Frederick Chong and Gianpaolo Carraro, Microsoft Corporation, April 2006.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479069.aspx

Punishment, law and justice.

Related to chapter 10 Werner, the FBI agent seeking for justice in the World Wide World, not with much success, Because of the lack of punishments by different countries, and the companies that are been attack has not much trust in the justice of the world. Alma comes to my mind when he is teaching his son Corianton about justice in Alma chapter 42. He explains:

"Now, repentance could not come unto men except there were a punishment, which also was eternal as the life of the soul should be, affixed opposite to the plan of happiness, which was as eternal also as the life of the soul. Now, how could a man repent except he should sin? How could he sin if there was no law? How could there be a law save there was a punishment? Now, there was a punishment affixed, and a just law given, which brought remorse of conscience unto man? Now, if there was no law given—if a man murdered he should die—would he be afraid he would die if he should murder. And also, if there was no law given against sin men would not be afraid to sin. And if there was no law given, if men sinned what could justice do, or mercy either, for they would have no claim upon the creature? But there is a law given, and a
punishment affixed, and a repentance granted; which repentance, mercy claimeth; otherwise, justice claimeth the creature and executeth the law, and the law inflicteth the punishment; if not so, the works of justice would be destroyed, and God would cease to be God… and the resurrection of the dead bringeth back men into the presence of God; and thus they are restored into his presence, to be judge according to their works, according to the law and justice. If he has desired to do evil and has not repented in his days, behold, evil shall be done unto him, according to the restoration of God."

Therefore, we can see that without punishment, there is no law, without law, there is no justice, and without justice, God would cease to be God. At the same time each government needs to apply the punishments on all those that brake others laws. That way they can help Werner in this fight against those that are not afraid to break any laws. By doing these, the companies would have more trust in the justice of the world and would be less crime, because they would be afraid of the punishment that would come from breaking the law. In addition, like Alma said in the last verse: those that desire evil, evil will be done unto them. So even when there may be not law on the land, there is a higher law, that they will be punish for doing evil things.

War Driving on October 30^th 2009

Abraham and Qurdi.

We went on 4th West North of North Temple, and we found about 18 networks open which 16 of them had security and two were completely open. The two networks that were open (Family and Linksys) did not have any security whatsoever and anybody could connect directly to the network without any problems or consequences.

All of the other networks have WEP security encryption to prevent access to the net. The ones that the name sounds like a business have security. It is extremely important that even if you don't have a business, you still need to make your access points secure by having a good firewall, a hard password, that you can constantly change (every 2 or 3 moths),turn off the network when not in use, and updating your systems. This days security means not just having a loaded gun and strong locks, but to constantly revising and changing your network.

windows xp takes too long at start up.

Insourcing

E-commerce is not safe:

           There is a high risk when it comes to ecommerce, and affects both, costumers and companies. Increasingly fraud for both the costumer and the business make the internet a hard place to trust when it comes to do a business transaction. For this reason you need to be really carefully were you perform those transactions and if it’s even worth, to invest time and money on ecommerce.  

More and more, people are trying to make ecommerce secure, but there is other points to consider before a company embarks on ecommerce. 

I.            You cannot do everything online, not all the products on the market are made for the web. Example: Buying a couch from Furniture.com. Have limitations when it comes to delivery, if you are outside their delivery area, you will be refer to a partner site[1].  

II.            Easy target for lawsuits around the world. Example:  EBay had to pay 63 million dollars to Louis Vuitton on French Court, for letting user’s sale fake perfume[2].  

III.            Even though there are millions of products on the web, only few are meant for ecommerce. The perfect product needs to be lightweight, easy to ship, and frequent reordering, most of the time even having free shipping. Example: 1800 contacts[3]. 

IV.            According to Hacker Safe CEO, Ken Leonard, 75% of ecommerce sites are not secure or do not consider security when launching their ecommerce sites[4]. 

Any type of online process or system that is capable of taking payment via credit card is open to abuse by the more unscrupulous and devious elements that haunt the Internet. It is also important to remember that there are not only credit card transactions that are under threat. Hacking into systems, which hold personal information such as: bank account numbers, names, addresses, etc. Another area that has a vast income potential for those, who would use the information illegally[5].

---

[1] http://www.furniture.com/Shop.aspx

[2]http://www.bizaims.com/news/business+economy/ebay+ordered+pay+40m+euros+selling+fake+louis+vuitton+goods

[3] http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/16338.html

[4] http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2007/10/03/hacker-safer/

[5] Ecommerce- safe and secure, John Sherida. http://ezinearticles.com/?Ecommerce---Safe-and-Secure?&id=210451.

abe recommend this product.

The Decision Support System

Something new, that I learn this past week. The DSS, is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions. But this is just the organization of a mass information to help us make a better decision, we have to gather all the other detail data that a computer can't analyze, remember sometimes there is people behind the numbers.

A perfect example to this is the DSS call "Isabel, is designed to help the doctors consider all the likely diagnoses and to make the latest medical information readily available at the point of care. The first step in developing the Isabel decision support system was to create taxonomy of more than 10,000 diseases and 4,000 drugs. Content for the system is stored on a server and consists of the latest medical textbooks, journals and other articles. When the healthcare professional enters the clinical features of the patient, Isabel instantly provides the user with a checklist of likely diagnoses, and with diagnosis-specific knowledge from medical textbooks and journals on tests to be performed, treatment options, lessons learned and recent advances. It is of great value in presenting likely options, so that physicians are able to consider all the possibilities before coming to a conclusion". (Decision support systems prove vital to healthcare By Judith Lamont, Ph.D., KMWorld Magazine).

So we can see that we have to take all the information into consideration before making a decision, especially when it comes to human beings. We have to know the facts, details, evidence, and especial needs to each situation. The DSS help us with the information and even may suggest some solutions to the problems but the responsibility to make a good final decision and implemented, rest in our shoulders.

Is the WWW secure enough?

 

There is a lot of talk about security, how to implemented, how to manage it, and if is really working or not. Businesses and home users depend on the World Wide Web to keep in contact, made business, and keep up to date on today's market. A member of the UK Parliament said on an interview with ZDnetUK; the internet is a fast moving, high tech, universal community, which needs international law enforcement and community action to increase the safety of people on the internet.

The US Government is pretty good when it comes about security, aside from human mistakes, they implement security systems and persecuted any who dare infiltrated it, like the case of Gary McKinnon from the UK, that is being extradite to the US for hacking into some military systems. When he got ask how he did it, he said used windows administrators accounts with blank passwords and no fire wall, which give him full control or access. So you see that you don't mess with the big dog, even when they make simple security (social level) mistakes. But what about the ordinary person that get attack almost every day, what guaranties do we have to protect us? There are laws to enforce it? well since the internet is international, there is a need for a www police, that would protect individuals around the globe and persecute those that violated the laws, but even with a police and legislation in place, it need the cooperation from everybody involved in that www community, set rules of behavior, norms of conduct, standards, that would glue together the www community like in any other country or nation.

It start on a local level with your own security implementation and rules, then community level with the help of the local police and service providers, next to a national level with the countries own regulations, and then to a international organization in charge of the global security, and there are countries that have already start this process, but it's far from achieve full order or control of the world wide web.

Is Windows Vista really a failure?

Abraham Zurita               September 24, 2009 Pondering Blog Week 4^th
 

  The question that comes to my mind: Is Windows Vista really a failure? I read on an article by Harry McCracken, from techologizer said "people still uses windows XP because is a better operating system. 63 % of people that visit technologizer on a windows pc do so, on windows XP, versus 37 % who uses Vista". Even do there are many conflicts between the questions on rather if it is a failure or not, many people agree that it was a lack of marketing and a bad product itself from Vista that drove Microsoft to launch a new operating system, Windows 7 which in any case, actually, people are waiting anxiously for it. I wonder why an organization so big and with so many resources did little to fix or resurrect Vista; we will have to look at the company history, business practices, tactics and marketing to come to a conclusion.

It is my opinion that Microsoft thinks they can just foist anything they want on users. The Vista era didn't really make an impact, other than to tick off a lot of users like Mr. Steve W. a CIO Blogger said: "Our Company in all fairness tried it. It crashed our computers repeatedly, and is slow and inefficient. It is our opinion that this program was change for change sake. We had to dump vista and return to XP with which we never had problems. In fact, we had to dump one computer because of the vista danger. We have made corporate decisions to switch to Mac. Their systems work so much more efficiently." So, more and more there are costumers that are thinking on the "other" options' to OS, and that, could mean big trouble for Microsoft. Mac can take this to their advantage and push their products to angry costumers of Vista and gain a whole wide market for their benefit.

That s why there is an important part of any business and it is call Feedback and customer service, to prevent the loss of customer trust and sales. This two are great tools to gather information or database, and quickly establish a way to improve the product or fix it, for the customers' sake. I think Microsoft forgot their clients and abandon them in the limbo of Vista. Since they did not have a good system or database in place to hear their customers complains and resolved them. That's way there is many dissatisfaction and criticism for Vista. They did not use the information, apply it to a good database or analyzed. So that they could portrait Vista as the best OS in the market, but the Windows Vista era never happen. That's why, in my opinion windows Vista is a failure.

On todays market there is a lot of competition concerning a product or a service, the need for companies to change it's way of business is inevitable, that's why it's so important to choose the right tools to drive a successful business. One of those tools is the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), "the most important development in the corporate use of information technology "(Devemport , 1998). There are a handful of products available that offer these services. The need for selecting this part of an organization is crucial.

Companies like ADP, Microsoft Dynamics, Sap, Lawson, Syspro, and many more, fight to offer their companies what they need. Which is help automate and stream line financial, customer relationships and supply chain process. In order to implement a success ARP system, there is the need to research the CSF's (Critical Success Factors), but here are some of the CSF's according to H. Ankkerman in his study on vicious and virtuous cycles in ERP implementation. Top management support, project team competence, interdepartmental co-operation, clear goals and objectives, project management, interdepartmental communication, management of expectation, project champion, vendor support and more.., but to him the most important of these are :

That way we can implement the right system and run it succefully, but also without the customer there is no business. According to a study by Yuling Fang, City University of Hong Kong, we learn that there is a level of concern a customer has when shopping online, "Fears" surrounding the internet as a place to do business still hinders the use of it for e-commerce purposes, but the presence of a reputable agent might in some manner mitigate this risk. We have to offer security along with the product and a sense of responsibility when handling customers information, that's why many organizations have implemented different security systems (company polices, software, passwords, and biometrics) to prevent any lack of distrust from their customers.

So we can see that as much as we want easy access to the customers and manageble information for our employees and vendors, implementing a new ERP system will not work if we do not choose the right ERP software, improve the communication and co-operation between the different departments and vendors, have the total support from the management and have the right security systems in place for our organization and customers, that way we will have the trust and confidence to deliver or products and services for a successful business.

“you need to be a jack of all trades and a master of one

I like what
Mr. McReynolds said: "you need to be a jack of all trades and a master of one". Not only obtaining the associates degree, but seeking extra value, by getting a certificate on a specific certification. Which I can apply to my new life, as a student at lds Business College. Even when I have not been in school for the last 7 years, I feel that my experiences as a missionary and personal events in my life are going to help me gather, the necessary skills I need to succeed in my goal to achieve higher education. And the idea to gather all the knowledge and the skills that I will learn trough the semester to finally meet my ultimate goal which is to obtain a college degree in Information systems.

Obtaining that degree is going to help me understand why companies need people with the training and the skills to improve their business. In a world clouded with thousands of different products or services that are offer to their customers. How I am going to help them by improving their services and products, finding the right markets by gathering data, transforming it to information and using it to ultimately delivering what the customers really wants from that specific brand. For example, I used to work for the automobile business for many years in which I notice that there was a big need for easy access to the public for information about repairing vehicles, that information is only access by the dealer at a high cost. That's why they charge a lot of money to repair the vehicles, and they always try to gather information thought surveys from recent and past costumers that 60% of the time don't answer or just won't come back to the dealer, but if they made access possible through a simple base website, they can offer the real information that the customers are looking for, about their vehicles and at the same time gathering extremely important information to improve their products and services.

By acquiring these skills I can like they said" sell myself for the best price, not just by the degree but for the actual value of the knowledge and skills that I will obtain as a person. In this time of "reseccion" were the values, moral and honor code are broken we need to stand our ground, stand taller and like the bears show the wolf, who is in charge and not afraid to fight back at the corruption of easy money, and show them that I am not only mean business but I will protect those systems for which I will work so hard.