"True to form, Melvin Greer's futurist thinking provides new applicability to Software as a Service that identifies ways of reducing costs, creating greater efficiencies, and ultimately providing significant long-term value through business transformation. He continues to be on the cutting edge of merging business function evolution and technology innovation to increase customer satisfaction and return on investments."
-Kevin Manuel-Scott, chairman and CEO, RONIN IT Services, LLC

"Melvin Greer provides an excellent guide to the Cloud computing IT model with a solid overview of concepts, business aspects, technical implications, benefits, challenges, and trends. Definitely a 'must read' for IT managers and enterprise architects considering adoption of this flexible, beneficial business model within their organization."
-John Magnuson, senior staff engineer, Lockheed Martin

"This book offers the most comprehensive view of Cloud computing and SaaS on the market today. The author skillfully lays out a game plan for government and commercial entities alike looking to stay relevant in this burgeoning business paradigm."
-Ken Brown, program account executive, IBM Federal

Almost every business reaches a time when the fundamentals change. This time is referred to as a strategic inflection point.

Adopting new technology or fighting the competition may not be enough when these critical moments arise. That's because inflection points build up force so quickly that organizations may have a hard time even putting a finger on what has changed. The way a firm responds could propel it to new heights or lead to its demise.

Over the last few years, industry has begun developing a model of information technology known as Cloud computing, which includes Software as a Service. This new model has reached an inflection point and will give users the choice to purchase IT as a service, as a complement to, or as a replacement of the traditional IT software/hardware infrastructure purchase.

It's time for businesses to transform how they approach advanced software and innovative business models so they can achieve real agility. If you are a decision maker involved with the deployment of information technology, then it's imperative that you understand "Software as a Service Inflection Point."

Social media and emerging internet technologies have expanded the ideas of marketing approaches. In particular, the phenomenon of the internet in China challenges the common perception of new media environments. Internet Mercenaries and Viral Marketing: The Case of Chinese Social Media presents case studies, textual analysis, media reviews, and in-depth interviews in order to investigate the Chinese "pushing hand" operation from the conceptual perspective of communications and viral marketing. This book is significant to researchers, marketers, and advocates interested in the persuasive influence of social networks.

The internet of things (IoT) has massive potential to transform current business models and enhance human lifestyles. With the current pace of research, IoT will soon find many new horizons to touch. IoT is now providing a base of technological advancement in various realms such as pervasive healthcare, smart homes, smart cities, connected logistics, automated supply chain, manufacturing units, and many more. IoT is also paving the path for the emergence of the digital revolution in industrial technology, termed Industry 4.0. Transforming the Internet of Things for Next-Generation Smart Systems focuses on the internet of things (IoT) and how it is involved in modern day technologies in a variety of domains. The chapters cover IoT in sectors such as agriculture, education, business and management, and computer science applications. The multi-disciplinary view of IoT provided within this book makes it an ideal reference work for IT specialists, technologists, engineers, developers, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in how IoT will be implemented in the next generation of smart systems and play an integral role in advancing technology in the future.

In "SOA and Web Services Interface Design," data architecture guru James Bean teaches you how to design web service interfaces that are capable of being extended to accommodate ever changing business needs and promote incorporation simplicity. The book first provides an overview of critical SOA principles, thereby offering a basic conceptual summary.It then provides explicit, tactical, and real-world techniques for ensuring compliance with these principles. Using a focused, tutorial-based approach the book provides working syntactical examples - described by Web services standards such as XML, XML Schemas, WSDL and SOAP - that can be used to directly implement interface design procedures, thus allowing you immediately generate value from your efforts. In summary, "SOA and Web Services Interface Design" provides the basic theory, but also design techniques and very specific implementable encoded interface examples that can be immediately employed in your work, making it an invaluable practical guide to any practitioner in today's exploding Web-based service market.
Provides chapters on topics of introductory WSDL syntax and XML Schema syntax, taking take the reader through fundamental concepts and into deeper techniques and allowing them to quickly climb the learning curve.Provides working syntactical examples - described by Web services standards such as XML, XML Schemas, WSDL and SOAP - that can be used to directly implement interface design procedures.Real-world examples generated using the Altova XML Spy tooling reinforce applicability, allowing you to immediately generate value from their efforts.A companion website with all artwork and code examples accompanies the book (http: //www.elsevierdirect.com/v2/companion.jsp?ISBN=9780123748911)
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Semantic Web technologies and applications have become increasingly important as new methods for understanding and expressing information are discovered. Progressive Concepts for Semantic Web Evolution: Applications and Developments unites research on essential theories, models, and applications of Semantic Web research. Contributions focus on mobile ontologies and agents, fuzzy databases, and new approaches to retrieval and evaluation in the Semantic Web.

Web portals continue to play a vital role in businesses by maintaining and extending business opportunities, as well as providing e-services to customers. Web Portal Design, Implementation, Integration, and Optimization discusses the challenges faced in building web services and integrating applications in order to reach the successful benefits web portals bring to an organisation. This collection of research aims to be a resource for researchers, developers, and industry practitioners involved in the technological, business, organisational and social dimensions of web portals.

Cloud computing has revolutionized computer systems, providing greater dynamism and flexibility to a variety of operations. It can help businesses quickly and effectively adapt to market changes, and helps promote users' continual access to vital information across platforms and devices.Cloud Computing Advancements in Design, Implementation, and Technologies outlines advancements in the state-of-the-art, standards, and practices of cloud computing, in an effort to identify emerging trends that will ultimately define the future of the cloud. A valuable reference for academics and practitioners alike, this title covers topics such as virtualization technology, utility computing, cloud application services (SaaS), grid computing, and services computing.

Ever notice that in spite of their pervasiveness designing web applications is still challenging? While their benefits motivate their creation, there are no well-established guidelines for design. This often results in inconsistent behaviors and appearances, even among web applications created by the same company.
Design patterns for web applications, similar in concept to those for web sites and software design, offer an effective solution. In Web Application Design Patterns, Pawan Vora documents design patterns for web applications by not only identifying design solutions for user interaction problems, but also by examining the rationale for their effectiveness, and by presenting how they should be applied.
Design interfaces faster, with a better rationale for the solutions you choose.
Learn from over more than 100 patterns, with extensive annotation on use and extension.
Take a short-cut into understanding the industry with more than 500 full-color screenshots and a web site for help, discussion, and a collection of additional patterns."

There are many different social media platforms that provide a wide array of services. Exploring the results yielded by these platforms can enhance their usefulness and impact on society's advancement. Social Media Performance Evaluation and Success Measurements is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on social networking participation expectations and values to examine individual performance in digital communication activities. Featuring coverage across a range of topics, such as crisis communication, social networking engagement, and return on investments, this publication is ideally designed for academicians, practitioners, and researchers seeking current research on the benefits of utilizing the social network environment of today.

E-Collaboration promotes interaction between people over the Internet, and is vital in virtual organization arrangements where people co-exist or work together, independent of time and location. E-Collaborations and Virtual Organizations covers a broad range of topics, from underlying technological structures to fundamental mechanisms that are relevant to e-Collaboration and virtual organizations. The chapters in this book present some of the current work in the field and represent a resource upon which knowledge, lessons, and views can be drawn upon for consideration and applications in the virtual world.