Web services -- Management

This research explores the impact of interactive communication on business-to business
(B2B) relationships. In the past decade the internet and especially social media as a mode of communication has grown rapidly in both consumer and business markets.
Drawing on marketing channels and communications literature this paper identifies the
dimensions of interactive communication and develops a theoretical framework to
examine their impact on satisfaction, commitment, and advocacy. Media synchronicity
theory and the concept of the internet as an alternative to the real world are used to
distinguish between digital and non-digital modes of communication. Relationship
marketing is used to identify the dimensions of interactivity: rationality, social
interaction, contact density, and reciprocal feedback. The framework developed is usedto explore the influence of face-to-face (F2F), digital, and traditional, impersonalcommunications on the dimensions of interactivity.Hypotheses linking the mode of communication: personal, digital, and impersonal with the dimensions of interactivity and relational outcomes are empirically examined with data from the commercial printing and graphic design industry. Confirmatory Factor Analysis is used to analyze the measurement and structural model. Personal, F2F communication has the greatest impact on social interaction, reciprocal feedback, and number of contacts. Digital communication has a weaker effect on these dimensions and impersonal communication has the weakest effect. Personal and Digital have equal impacts on rationality and rationality is the only dimension of interactivity positively associated with relationship satisfaction. Contact density has a negative impact on relationship satisfaction and this negative impact is greater with personal communication that it is with digital. The study shows that affective commitment leads to advocacy in a B2B channel, but trust and calculative commitment have no impact on advocacy. The findings of the study have implications for both managers and researchers regarding the mode and content of communications in B2B relationships.

Close friends have been shown to influence adolescent problem behaviors,
especially alcohol abuse (Urberg, Degirmencioglu, and Pilgrim, 1997). The degree of
influence, however varies as a function of individual characteristics such as peer
acceptance (Laursen, Hafen, Kerr, and Stattin, 2012) and age (Popp et al., 2008). The
present study examines whether differences in influence extend to perceptions of
friendship quality. Using a sample of 764 Swedish adolescents involved in stable samesex reciprocal best friend relationships that lasted at least one year, analyses used
distinguishable dyad actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) analyses (Kenny,
Kashy, & Cook, 2006) to track influence over two years of the friendship. More
satisfied friends were more influential than less satisfied friends on intoxication
frequency and truancy. The findings of this study indicate that influence accompanies perceptions of quality. Those with higher perceptions of quality exhibit more influence
on friends who perceive relatively lower quality.

Cloud Computing is a new computing model consists of a large pool of hardware
and software resources on remote datacenters that are accessed through the Internet.
Cloud Computing faces significant obstacles to its acceptance, such as security,
virtualization, and lack of standardization. For Cloud standards, there is a long debate
about their role, and more demands for Cloud standards are put on the table. The Cloud
standardization landscape is so ambiguous. To model and analyze security standards for
Cloud Computing and web services, we have surveyed Cloud standards focusing more on
the standards for security, and we classified them by groups of interests. Cloud
Computing leverages a number of technologies such as: Web 2.0, virtualization, and
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA uses web services to facilitate the creation of
SOA systems by adopting different technologies despite their differences in formats and
protocols. Several committees such as W3C and OASIS are developing standards for web services; their standards are rather complex and verbose. We have expressed web services security standards as patterns to make it easy for designers and users to understand their key points. We have written two patterns for two web services standards; WS-Secure Conversation, and WS-Federation. This completed an earlier work we have done on web services standards. We showed relationships between web services security standards and used them to solve major Cloud security issues, such as, authorization and access control, trust, and identity management. Close to web services, we investigated Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), and we addressed security considerations in BPEL and how to enforce them. To see how Cloud vendors look at web services standards, we took Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a case-study. By reviewing AWS documentations, web services security standards are barely mentioned. We highlighted some areas where web services security standards could solve some AWS limitations, and improve AWS security process. Finally, we studied the security guidance of two major Cloud-developing organizations, CSA and NIST. Both missed the quality of attributes offered by web services security standards. We expanded their work and added benefits of adopting web services security standards in securing the Cloud.