Commodification of Industrial Software: A Case for Open Source

The European software-intensive industry is facing challenges related to heterogeneous distributed development. These challenges are due to the commodification of software. Software that originally was differentiating (that is, helped distinguish one company's products from another's) is now available as a commodity. So, embedded systems companies are adopting open source practices and becoming involved in open source development. This article illustrates how two large European companies in the secondary software sector utilize collaborative open source development to deal with software commodification. Software commodification can also lead to new forms of collaborative development, such as inner-source development.     

Replacing Proprietary Software on the Desktop

Open standards, open source software, and Web applications are causing a major shift in the way enterprises manage software. Whereas companies have traditionally been tied to a particular vendor and upgraded their software only when new versions became available, they are increasingly able to change software stacks with less fear of disruption due to incompatibilities or contractual hindrances. More businesses also have the choice of using Web applications that require only a browser instead of using software maintained on local PCs. Open source software and Web applications can be a cost-effective alternative for businesses. As enterprises become more familiar with the benefits that the open community approach and Internet computing offer, open source software and Web applications replace conventional software. The best strategy for our company depends on our particular circumstances     

COTS integration: plug and pray?

For most software applications, the use of commercial off-the-shelf products has become an economic necessity. Gone are the days when upsized industry and government information technology organizations had the luxury of trying to develop-and, at greater expense, maintain their own database, network, and user-interface management infrastructure. Viable COTS products are climbing up the protocol stack, from infrastructure into applications solutions in such areas as office and management support, electronic commerce, finance, logistics, manufacturing, law and medicine. For small and large commercial companies, time-to-market pressures also exert a strong pressure toward COTS-based solutions. However, most organizations have also found that COTS gains are accompanied by frustrating COTS pains. The paper summarizes experience on the relative advantages and disadvantages of COTS solutions     

软件过程集成框架的实践与思考

软件实践表明产品开发的过程和产品品质有产非常密切的联系,因此很多软件企业都把提高软件开发过程作为提高软件品质的重要手段。现有的过程模型中CMM/CMMI是很多企业采用的一个框架,CMMI模型非常复杂(描述性文档就有超过1000页),因此很需要有一种软件来支持软件过程的改进。本文给出了一个软件过程改进集成框架SPIF,较为详细地叙述了SPIF中项目计划与进度监控的实现。SPIF对CMM/CMMI有着良好的支持,经过几个软件公司的实践表明SPIF实现了软件过程可视化、管理效率化,可以对软件企业实施CMM/CMMI过程改进有着很好的促进作用。     

Applications and architectures [microprocessor chips]

Chips are getting more expensive both to design and to manufacture. That makes it tempting for semiconductor companies to push more functions onto a single chip, using software to customize it for specific applications. Using software to customize a few platforms for a variety of applications spreads the mask costs over more chips. It also saves the time of switching from one mask set to another. Time is money, so reducing the variety of parts that require fabrication helps reduce costs in other ways as well. As a result, chip manufacturers try to design platforms that can support a range of products. Customers who buy the chips to build systems use software to customize the functionality.     

Selecting prospects for cross-selling financial products using multivariate credibility

Insurance policies or credit instruments are financial products that involve a long-term relationship between the customer and the company. For many companies a possible way to expand its business is to sell more products to preferred customers in its portfolio. Data on the customers’ past behaviour is stored in the company’s database and these data can be used to assess whether or not more products should be offered to a specific customer. In particular, data on past claiming history, for insurance products, or past information on defaulting, for banking products, can be useful for determining how the client is expected to behave in other financial products. This study implements a method for using historical information of each individual customer, and the portfolio as a whole, to select a target group of customers to whom it would be interesting to offer more products. This research can help to improve marketing to existing customers and to earn higher profits for the company.     

Open source security: opportunity or oxymoron?

As the computer industry focuses on system and network security, a growing number of users are taking a closer look at open source software in order to gauge whether its potential advantages outweigh its possible disadvantages. Although open source security has been around for years, it has never been as widely used as open source products like the Linux OS or Apache Web server have been. John Pescatore, Internet security research director at market-research firm Gartner Inc., said open source security tools now represent 3 to 5 percent of security-software usage but could comprise 10 to 15 percent by 2007. A key factor in this potential growth is the quality of numerous open source security packages. Open source software products include free tools that users can download from the Internet, packages that come with commercial vendor support, and tools bundled with closed source products. The most popular tools include Netfilter and iptables; intrusion-detection systems such as Snort, Snare, and Tripwire; vulnerability scanners like Nessus and Saint; authentication servers such as Kerberos; and firewalls like T.Rex. Some companies are even beginning to use open source security to protect mission-critical applications     

质量管理在软件开发中的应用

随着软件行业高速的发展,软件开发的超期和超预算都成为软件行业中的重要问题。为了有效地管理软件开发,一些公司增设了质量管理岗位。在软件开发过程中及时地管理和反馈项目信息,把所有重要问题都控制在项目初期,节约大量的人力、物力和财力。     

Optimierte Softwarelizenzierung – Kombinierte Lizenztypen im Lizenzportfolio

Although software licenses usually range among the most expensive items within the IT budget, they still lack the necessary attention by many companies. Therefore, most companies inadequately have implemented their software asset management neglecting further potential for cost reduction, which can be obtained by optimizing the use of different license types. This paper shows how possible savings can be realized by combining different types of licenses in a license portfolio. The model presented is based on the most common license types considering different user groups as well as their behavior. Additionally to cost risks, the risk of service quality is also taken into consideration. The following examples illustrate the model's high relevance and show how it can be can be applied in practice.     

A new process knowledge representation approach using parameter flow chart

Knowledge in various stages of the product development process has become increasingly important for manufacturing companies to improve their performance, especially for those One-of-a-Kind Production (OKP) companies producing highly customized products. Process knowledge is a very special type of knowledge that controls how products are best manufactured. This knowledge can help OKP companies produce high value-added products with better quality at shorter times and at a competitive cost. Process knowledge is normally hard to capture and manage and is even more difficult to represent. This paper proposes a Parameter Flow Chart (PFC) based new knowledge representation method which efficiently combines parameter information, flow chart technology, and visualization technology. The goal of this research is to provide a user-friendly and effective way of representing process knowledge for OKP companies so they can develop and accumulate their own process knowledge repository. The basic definition and principle of the approach will be introduced first and the software system model then proposed. Two related key issues, the modeling of various chart units used in the PFC approach and dealing with expressions containing various parameters, are discussed in detail. The prototype version of the system has been developed and demonstrated with case studies, which has proven the feasibility of the proposed approach.     

An interoperable spatiotemporal weather radar data dissemination system

This paper investigates an interoperable framework to disseminate Earth Science data to different application domains. The proposed framework can manage different Earth science data products and raster snapshots over time through the use of relevant metadata information. The framework generates images to be accessed by GIS software for various Earth science and web‐based applications. The access is enabled through the compliance with OpenGeospatial Consortium's Web Map Service (WMS) for interoperability such that any WMS viewer can access the service. The framework can provide GIS users the capability to incorporate geospatial information from other WMS servers. Using the United States NEXt generation weather RADar (NEXRAD) data, we demonstrate how the proposed framework can facilitate the dissemination of Earth Science data to a broad community in a near real‐time fashion. The proposed framework can be used to manage and disseminate various types of spatiotemporal Earth science data.     

An eye on India: outsourcing debate continues

US companies increasingly began outsourcing software development work to countries such as India, which touts low personnel costs and plentiful technical expertise, during the dotcom shakeout. Today, the trend shows no sign of stopping. It has changed the landscape for US software professionals, reshaping how companies plan projects and choose employees. US software developers will not be going the way of the dinosaurs, analysts say, but they will need to cleverly manage their careers and thoroughly understand the new environment. At the same time, businesses are learning more about offshore outsourcing's challenges. The author discusses the growing debate about its merits.     

Branded interface toolkits

Typical software companies want the applications they market to have a consistent look and feel, so as to brand or identify their particular family of products or product line. Current user interface (UI) implementation techniques serve this business need poorly, tending to treat each application as a unique, independent artifact sharing little, if any, UI implementation code with other applications. Coupled with the overwhelming complexity found in modern UI toolkits, this results in unnecessarily high development costs for interfaces, and is at odds with the need of software companies to devote their resources to value‐added application code rather than incidental user‐interface implementation. This paper presents a model for a domain‐based UI application framework that addresses these issues: consistency in a family of products, both in operation and presentation; reduced implementation costs; and rapid development times. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Packaging reusable software assets

With resources tight in today's economy, a renewed interest in making the most of legacy code is spurring various attempts to recycle software assets. With such an emphasis on components, reusing them - or reusing significant portions of them - can lower development costs and improve productivity by accelerating software development cycle times and eliminating redundancy. A consortium of software development and component management tool companies have banded together to hammer out an outline of common conventions for packaging software assets that makes it easier to manage and reuse them. They call the standards they've developed the reusable asset specifications.     

The Bazaar inside the Cathedral: Business Models for Internal Markets

Software product-line development lets organizations better optimize software development efficiency by building a shared set of assets for reuse in multiple products. This process introduces many challenges, not least of which is creating the initial set of reusable software assets. To accomplish this, organizations often establish a central software platform group. Such a group faces a serious problem: existing systems groups already have a large set of software components that they use to build their products. If companies are to successfully transition to product-line development, these systems groups must shift their investments from existing software components to the new reusable product-line assets. One way to encourage this is to create an internal open source software community that lets systems groups actively contribute their existing components to the platform. In OSS, a community works together to develop software. Because the software's users are part of the community, they can add the assets they need. Inner-source-software (ISS) development applies OSS within a limited environment that has a closed border (such as a company, a division, or a consortium). So, companies using the ISS approach essentially establish an OSS community within the confines of their organization.     

Service-Oriented Computing: Bringing Business Systems to the Web

The notion of "service" has spurred major evolutions for both information systems and the Web. A software application is no longer considered a monolithic component; it can be divided into services that are smaller components defined by their function and accessible through well-defined interfaces and protocols. As a result, IT actors are using service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to remodel the information systems of many companies while the Web is increasingly becoming a programmable place. In both domains, developers build composite client applications to consume these services. Even boundaries between enterprise services and Internet services are vanishing. Some companies, such as Strikelron provide enterprise services that were previously always hosted internally - like customer relationship management solutions. As a consequence, companies now have the technologies required to bring their business online. With Web services, private business processes can be exposed to partners through public composite Web applications. When new projects emerge, companies need guidance to properly handle such work. In this context, we aim to provide companies solutions - through a methodology, an architecture, and technical choices - that will help them solve generic problems such as security and application conception     

Measuring the ROI of software process improvement

Software process improvement has been on the agenda of both academics and practitioners, with the Capability Maturity Model as its de facto method. Many companies have invested large sums of money in improving their software processes, and several research papers document SPI's effectiveness. SPI aims to create more effective and efficient software development and maintenance by structuring and optimizing processes. SPI assumes that a well-managed organization with a defined engineering process is more likely to produce products that consistently meet the purchaser's requirements within schedule and budget than a poorly managed organization with no such engineering process. We discuss about the measuring the ROI in software process improvement.     

On reducing a quantile optimization problem with discrete distribution to a mixed integer programming problem

We propose an equivalent reduction of the quantile optimization problem with a discrete distribution of random parameters to a partially integer programming problem of large dimension. The number of integer (Boolean) variables in this problem equals the number of possible values for the random parameters vector. The resulting problems can be solved with standard discrete optimization software. We consider applications to quantile optimization of a financial portfolio and show results of numerical experiments.     

The role of policy in balancing outsourcing and homeland security

Many US high-tech companies outsource software development overseas, particularly to countries known for their ability to develop sophisticated software. In particular, India, Pakistan, China, and Russia not only have strong technical capabilities but also a large and technically sophisticated labor force. Excess labor supply, coupled with a high-quality work product, has attracted overseas investment, particularly among US firms eager to develop and deliver cutting-edge products at lower cost. Outsourcing has not been confined to high-tech software development; it extends to application service provisioning, in which a supplier owns and remotely manages an organization's business applications. However, corporations must balance the benefits of outsourcing high-tech software development and application service provisioning against the costs, especially with regard to homeland security.