Electronic and Mobile commerce today

Definition and Brief description

E-Commerce is defined as the buying and selling of goods and services over the website ( Kalakota and Robinson, 2002). The transactions are considered to be e-commerce in nature when they are carried in electronic form in a computer-based network using a authenticated monetary payment platforms like the PayPal, money bookers, and pioneer.

Mobile commerce is the selling and buying of goods and services using the Mobile terminal in a wireless network. The mobile terminal includes smart phones, iPads, and PDAs. The latest GSM technology is the Long term evolution for the fourth generation networks. Mobile commerce resulted from the convergence between the IT and the telecommunication. The commerce is carried out using mobile providers pay bill numbers, payment system that can be incorporated in the website when doing online sales. Hence the electronic and mobile commerce allows for any time any where access and transaction of business.

Mobile Commerce Solutions

The various mobile applications are mobile banking, mobile entertainment, mobile information services, mobile marketing, mobile shopping, mobile ticketing, and the telematics services. There are also various payment mechanisms that are making use of mobile services; they have the capability of supporting electronic money. They are payment using credit card, payment against invoice, payment by prepaid card, payment by premium sms, payment through telephone bills and the mobile payment using the pay bill number for different utilities.

Advantages and disadvantages of M-Commerce

No internet connectivity needed, possibility of video conference, convenience , flexibility of

access, time efficient and personalization. Its disadvantages are constraint to technology, difficulty in learning interface, WAP/SMS limited in character, small screen, limited bandwidth etc

Electronic Commerce Solutions

 The various e-commerce solutions are internet marketing, search engine optimization, website design and development, customized shopping cart, application integration, Customer self service, support and maintenance, and webhosting.

Advantages and disadvantages of E-Commerce

Not geographically bound, easier to compare cost from different stores, improved customer interaction, easier set up even for small firms, easier way for advertising, and better expansion of market cause of global appearance.

The disadvantages are long time of delivery, delivery uncertainty,  not effective for perishable goods, limited selection on sensory information, goods cannot be returned, security issues, unexpected defines services, no personal service, and size and the number of concurrent transaction can be restricted.

 

Enterprise System

These are software packages that are used in supporting the business processes, information flow, and reporting and data analysis with an enterprise network. An organization must ensure that proper data management standardization is put in place to fully support the enterprise system.

The three Tiers of an enterprise system are Tier1(T1) which forms the main source of information in an enterprise network,  housing critical business processes, reporting functionality and support to high risk operations by ensuring compliance to standards. Tier 2(T2) offer security control to ensure integrity, availability and confidentiality of the data. Finally the Tier 3 is the front end of the data that is available for customer for manipulation.

Example of enterprise systems are cloud solutions, data solution and security solutions

Advantages of enterprise system

Reduce pressure on cost.  Organizations are looking for doing more at a lesser cost, as their IT budgets remains flat

Better data management and analysis for the organization data that is always in the upward trends. It estimated that by 2020 the amount of data will reach forty times the current day data.

To ensure security to an organizations data. It is estimated that there an average of 60,000 attacks executed on corporate systems per day. Hence the need for security compliance is vital.

Enterprise systems  does the role of managing vital processes and information needed by an organization to generate new business,  get new client, and capture new market. This is only realized using robust enterprise system consisting of servers, software and the storage.

Cloud Computing

This has emergence due to the convergence of three key trends in technology as service orientation, virtualization and the standardization of computation through the internet. It enables the developers and users make use of the services without any knowledge or expertise on it `and with no control of the technology infrastructure that supports them. This framework relieves the users of the burden of capital expenditure on the hardware, software and the services because the customers only pay the provider for what they have used, with the consumption being billed on utility basis ( Dash)

Types of Cloud computing

The three types of Cloud computing are private cloud, private hosted cloud and public cloud.

The private clouds are standardized computing resources dedicated to a single organization usually hosted on the organizations data centre. It also configured to work with the current investment but set to deliver a new service. Example is eBay.

Hosted private cloud is made of a dedicated infrastructure hosted by a third party , and is not accessible to other organizations

Public cloud is hosted externally and is shared with other organizations. It’s billed on utility basis as the customer only pays for what they have used. Examples are Amazon, Google Apps, Windows Azure.

Iaas, Paas and Saas

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This component provides flexible ways to create, use and manage virtual machines (VMs). Example is Amazon S3, SQL Azure.

Platform as a service (PaaS). It lays more emphasis on the provision of the higher-level capabilities  that surpass the VMs that are crucial in supporting the applications. Examples are Force.com, Google App Engine, Windows Azure (Platform).

Software as a service (SaaS). These are the applications that provide business value for users. Examples are Google Docs, Salesforce CRM, SAP Business by Design.

 Benefits of Cloud Computing

Reduction in response and run time for running batches of jobs cause of the virtual machine technology.

Minimized infrastructure risks as the organization does not need to invest in physical servers

Lower cost of implementation as the infrastructures are rented, also the low cost in purchasing the computing cycle using the SIP(Microsoft White Paper).

 

Increased pace of innovation as the implementation cost is low, this allows startup companies to  develop new software products  within a short time and at a lower cost.

 

No soft ware release maintenance like licensing, up grading or maintenance required as all this are done by the Cloud computing service provider

 

Mobile profile created in cloud can be accessed globally; this makes it much beneficial to small companies that do not have the power to invest heavily in the infrastructure

 

Disadvantages Cloud computing

Lack of connectivity to the providers’ system cause 100% downtimes, unlike the traditional application that could have locally arranged workaround as the incident is being resolved.

Lack of implementation of standard has seen the over usage of the providers system, this can lead to degraded services, when the capability of the infrastructure is surpassed. This can lead to the cases of the denial of services.

High threats to organization data, hence high investment on the security system in cases we have public cloud where the infrastructure is shared between different organizations.

Portal Value Chain analysis

 

One business Finance

This is an economic activity helping commercial and non commercial business get money for their short and long term opex and capex. An investment bank may partner with a  business entity to finance its operations based on the firm size, financial health and monetary needs(Codjia, 2014)

Moodle

The word moodle means Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic learning Environment. This is an open source VLE , hence no license is required for one to use it. Developers are able to access the software codes and customize it to fit their needs (University of Greenwich)

Moodle is a software package for developing internet based online sales, courses hence supports the social constructionist for education. Constructionist view people as continues coming up with new knowledge in their environment.

Moodle page consists of key sections as navigation, your profile and messaging.  Navigation: Has the navigation block for going back to the previous page without causing a problem to the system. The profile forms the face in the moodle website and messaging provides ways of contacting others in a moodle system.

Reference

Debashish Das. Cloud Computing

 

Greenwich University Training Materials. Moodle Handbook

Kalakota, R. and Robinson, M., 2002. M-business: The Race to Mobility. McGraw-Hill, New York.

IBM. Enterprise Systems

Microsoft White Paper. Cloud Computing: What IT Professionals Need to Know

 

 

Keith J. and  Burkhard N.The Future Of Cloud Computing: Opportunities For European Cloud Computing Beyond 2010

 

 

 Niranjanamurthy et all(2013). Analysis of E-Commerce and M-Commerce: Advantages, Limitations and Security Issue. International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering Vol. 2, Issue 6, June 2013.

Seema N and Chang-Tien. (2005).  M-Payment Solutions and M-Commerce Fraud Management. Virginia Tech, USA