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E-Business
Lecture 3: E-Business Infrastructure
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Agenda
• The Internet
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Internet Timeline
Intranet and Extranet
World Wide Web
URL
Domain Names
• Communication Standards
– TCP/IP
– HTTP Protocol
• Web Pages Standards
– HTML
– XML
• EDI
• ASP
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Introduction
• Defining an adequate e-business infrastructure is
vital to all companies adopting e-business.
• Infrastructure refers to:
– Combination of hardware such as servers and client
PCs in an organization
– Network used to link this hardware and the software
applications used to deliver services to workers within
the e-business and also to its partners and customers.
– Architecture of networks, hardware and software.
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The Internet
• The Internet is a global system of interconnected
computer networks that use the standard Internet
Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users
worldwide.
• It is a network of networks that consists of millions
of private, public, academic, business, and
government networks of local to global scope that
are linked by a broad array of electronic and
optical networking technologies.
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Evolution of the Internet
• Innovation Phase, 1964–1974
– Creation of fundamental building blocks
– E.g. the concept of packet switching was introduced.
• Institutionalization Phase, 1975–1994
– Large institutions provide funding and legitimization
– Department of defense and the National Science Foundation (NSF),
provided funding
• Commercialization Phase,1995–present
– Private corporations take over, expand Internet backbone and local
service
– During this period internet became a technological need in government
agencies and companies
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The Internet Timeline
• In this present age, the Internet is considered the most important
means of global communications.
• [1950-1970]
– 1958 – President Eisenhower requested funding for the establishment of
the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). His request was
approved.
– 1962 – J.C. R. Licklider and W.Clark wrote a paper on the concept of the
Internet. The paper was titled “On-Line Man Computer Communications”.
– 1965 – The first network experiment took place at the MIT Lincoln Lab, and
it had two computers communicating with each other. The experiment was
conducted by Larry Roberts.
– 1966 – The ARPA project started with Larry Roberts as the chief scientist.
– 1969 – The ARPA was introduced online as a connection between 4 major
universities in the US.
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The Internet Timeline
• [1970-1985]
– 1972 – Ray Tomlinson, a computer scientist in Cambridge
Massachusetts, introduced the electronic mail. The symbol
@ was used in the email address to separate the name of the
user and the name of the network.
– 1973 – The design of the Transmission Control Panel/Internet
Protocol (TCP/IP) was developed, and it would become the
standard for Internet communication in 1983.
– 1976 – President candidate Jimmy Carter used the email to
make plans for his campaign.
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The Internet Timeline
– 1981 – Microsoft developed Disk Operating System
(DOS).
– 1982 – The term “Internet” was introduced.
– 1984 – The Domain Name System (DNS) was set up,
and domain names were given extensions like .com,
.org, and .edu.
– 1985 – America Online, which was then known as
Quantum Computer Services, made its debut.
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The Internet Timeline
[1985 – 1999]
• 1988 – The Internet Worm virus temporarily disabled
10% of the Internet servers around the world.
• 1989 – The World (world.std.com) became the first dialup Internet access provider. Tim Berners-Lee
developed the World Wide Web to enable users to use
hyperlinks to connect to documents in websites.
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The Internet Timeline
• 1990 – Peter Deutsch of Montreal’s McGill University developed
an FTP site archive called Archie to index the Internet. The Archie
was regarded as the first search engine.
• 1991 – The Gopher point-and-click navigation was designed at
the University of Minnesota.
• 1994 – The official website of the White House,
www.whitehouse.gov, was launched. Commercial websites
were set up and marketing campaigns were carried out with the
use of email, leading to the coining of the term spamming.
Netscape Communications was established by Marc Andreessen
and Jim Clark, who also started the Navigator browser.
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The Internet Timeline
• 1995 – America Online, CompuServe, and
Prodigy became providers of dial-up Internet
access. The Java Internet programming language
was released by Sun Microsystems. Windows 95
was introduced.
• 1996 – The Internet was used by around 45
million people, of which 30 million were
Americans. There were personal computers in
43.2 million households in the US, and 14
million of these had Internet access.
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The Internet Timeline
• 1997 – The term weblog was introduced, and it was later
changed to blog.
• 1998 – The first office of search engine giant Google
was set up in California.
• 1999 – Shawn Fanning, a college student, developed a
computer application called Napster to allow music to be
swapped on the Internet. As Internet shopping became
more popular, the term E-Commerce was frequently
used. MySpace.com was started.
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The Internet Timeline
[2000 onwards]
• 2000 – Many Internet users were hit by viruses, such as “Stages”
and “Love Bug”, and many companies were temporarily forced to
shut down their networks. Investment capital on the Internet dried
up, and many dotcoms had to be closed down. Time Warner was
bought by America Online for $16 billion, resulting in the biggest
merger ever.
• 2001 – The number of email messages sent daily had increased to
9.8 billion. Wikipedia was launched.
• 2002 – About 544.2 million people around the world were using
the Internet, with 164.14 million in the US alone.
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The Internet Timeline
• 2003 – The Apple iTunes Music Store was
launched and it offered downloads of songs at the
price of 99 cents each. 50% of all emails sent
were unsolicited emails, and President Bush
signed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 to reduce the
number of unsolicited emails received by Internet
users.
• 2004 – The amount of money spent online had
reached $117 billion, which was a 23% increase
from the previous year.
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The Internet Timeline
• 2005 – YouTube was launched.
• 2006 – The number of websites on the Internet
had risen to 92 million.
• 2008 – In a bid to compete with Google, Microsoft
made an offer to buy Yahoo! for a price of $44.6
billion.
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Activity 1
• Give reasons why the Internet took a
long time to develop into today’s
essential business tool.
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Intranet and Extranets
• Intranet
– TCP/IP network located within a single
organization for communications and
processing
• Extranet
– Formed when firms permit outsiders to access
their internal TCP/IP networks
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Intranet Applications
– Email
– Web publishing of corporate documents, Web forms, and Webto-database links that allow users to access information.
– Newsletters, information on benefits and enrollment
– Job listings and classifieds
– Libraries
– Stock quotes
– Maps
– Historical data
– Catalogs
– Price lists
– Information on competitors' products
– Customer service data
– Etc…
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Advantages of Intranet
• Speedier communication and access to information than the
Internet.
• Security and protection in the form of the aforementioned firewalls
as well as password-protected access and secure servers.
• Allows companies to control their business easier and manage
their employees more successfully.
• Less paperwork, increased productivity, added flexibility, and
versatility are other factors that intranet users take advantage of.
All of this adds up to a bottom line that is attractive in any
business decision: the ability to save money and increase
profits.
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Extranet Applications
• Supporting day-to-day collaboration by service
companies who need to share and organize documents
with their clients
– Exchanging billing invoices and payments through Electronic
Data Interchange (EDI)
– Sharing online catalogs with suppliers, vendors and customers
to eliminate printing costs
– Entering into joint ventures with other businesses
– Collaborating with other companies to develop training
materials
– Providing online services to customers
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Advantages of Extranet
• Extranets can improve organization productivity by automating
processes that were previously done manually (e.g.: reordering of
inventory from suppliers). Automation can also reduce the margin
of error of these processes.
• Extranets allow organization or project information to be viewed at
times convenient for business partners, customers, employees,
suppliers and other stake-holders. This cuts down on meeting
times and is an advantage when doing business with partners in
different time zones.
• Information on an extranet can be updated, edited and changed
instantly. All authorised users therefore have immediate access to
the most up-to-date information.
• Extranets can improve relationships with key customers, providing
them with accurate and updated information.
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Activity 1
• Explain how useful are intranet and
extranet for an e-business(B2B
Companies).
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World Wide Web
• The World Wide Web is a vast repository of data and
information connected through hyperlinks.
• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the common
language used to create Web documents.
• It is very easy to use and is now included in most
common software applications, such as Word,
WordPerfect, and Excel.
• As the technology improves to include audio, video,
animated graphics, and movies on Web sites
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World Wide Web
• Web Browsers
– Software used to access the information on the WWW that is
stored on Web Servers.
– Internet Explorer (67%) and Firefox (23%) dominate the market
– Other browsers include:
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Netscape
Opera
Safari (for Apple)
Google’s Chrome
• Web Servers
– Used to store, manage and supply the information that is on
the WWW.
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World Wide Web
• URL - Uniform Resource Locator
– Address used by Web browser to identify location of content on the Web
– E.g: http://www.azimuth-interactive.com/flash_test
[https: secure site]
• Domain Name
– IP address expressed in natural language
• Domain Name System (DNS)
– Allows numeric IP addresses to be expressed in natural language
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Search Engines
• Identify Web pages that match queries based on one
or more techniques
– Keyword indexes, page ranking
• Also serve as:
– Shopping tools
– Advertising vehicles (search engine marketing)
– Tool within e-commerce sites
• Outside of e-mail, most commonly used Internet
activity
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How Google Works
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World Wide Web
• Internet Access Software Applications
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Emails
Chats
Newsgroups
FTP
Blogs
Wikis
WWW
Social Networks
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Communication Standards
• TCP/IP
– TCP/IP is the communication protocol for communication between
computers on the Internet.
– TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol.
– TCP/IP defines how electronic devices (like computers) should be
connected to the Internet, and how data should be transmitted between
them.
• TCP/IP is TCP and IP working together.
– TCP takes care of the communication between your application software
(i.e. your browser) and your network software.
– IP takes care of the communication with other computers.
– TCP is responsible for breaking data down into IP packets before they are
sent, and for assembling the packets when they arrive.
– IP is responsible for sending the packets to the correct destination.
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Communication Standards
• HTTP
– The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an Application
Layer protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia
information systems.
– HTTP is a request/response standard typical of client-server
computing.
• In HTTP, web browsers typically act as clients, while an application
running on the computer hosting the web site acts as a server.
• The client, which submits HTTP requests, is also referred to as the user
agent.
• The responding server, which stores or creates resources such as
HTML files and images, may be called the origin server.
• In between the user agent and origin server may be several
intermediaries, such as proxies, gateways, and tunnels.
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Web Page Standards
• HTML
• HTML is a language for describing web pages.
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HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language
A markup language is a set of markup tags
HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages
• HTML Documents = Web Pages
– HTML documents describe web pages
– HTML documents contain HTML tags and plain text
– HTML documents are also called web pages
• The purpose of a web browser (like Internet Explorer or Firefox) is
to read HTML documents and display them as web pages. The
browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to
interpret the content of the page.
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Web Page Standards
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XML
What is XML?
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XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language
XML is a markup language much like HTML
XML was designed to carry data, not to display data
XML tags are not predefined. You must define your own tags
XML is designed to be self-descriptive
The Difference Between XML and HTML
– XML is not a replacement for HTML.
– XML and HTML were designed with different goals.
– XML was designed to transport and store data, with focus on what data is.
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HTML was designed to display data, with focus on how data looks.
HTML is about displaying information, while XML is about carrying information.
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Electronic Data Interchange
• EDI is the computer-to-computer exchange of business
information using a public standard.
• EDI is a central part of Electronic Commerce because it enables
businesses to exchange information electronically much faster,
more cheaply and more accurately than is possible using a paperbased system.
• How Does EDI Work?
– In EDI, electronic documents (purchase orders, bills, etc.) are given
standardized electronic formats and numbers, so everyone involved can
correctly interpret the information being transferred.
– Value-Added networks (VANs), maintained by companies similar to longdistance phone companies, provide telecommunications connectivity
between Trading Partners.
– Translation software is used by each Trading Partner to translate the
business data.
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What Are the Benefits of Electronic Commerce and
Electronic Data Interchange?
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Greatly increase opportunities through wider diffusion of procurement
information.
Improve overall business quality through better record-keeping, fewer errors
in data, reduced processing time, less reliance on human interpretation of data,
and minimized unproductive time.
Reduce inventory because of faster and more accurate filling of orders.
Reduce mailing costs due to mailroom sorting/distribution time, elimination of
lost documents, and reduction of postage.
Reduce order time since EDI allows businesses to process orders much faster.
Improve customer relationships with higher customer satisfaction due to
faster response to orders and less paper to handle.
Reduce billing and closeout time, since orders are filled and delivered more
quickly.
Provide better management decision-making information with accurate
documentation and audit trails of transactions identifying areas of greatest
potential for cost reduction or efficiency improvement.
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Application Service Provider
• An ASP is a business that provides computer-based
services to customers over a network.
• The need for ASPs has evolved from the increasing
costs of specialized software that have far exceeded the
price range of small to medium sized businesses. As
well, the growing complexities of software have led to
huge costs in distributing the software to end-users.
Through ASPs, the complexities and costs of such
software can be cut down. The complexities and costs of
such software can be cut down.
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Application Service Provider
• In addition, the issues of upgrading have been
eliminated from the end-firm by placing the onus
on the ASP to maintain up-to-date services, 24 x
7 technical support, physical and electronic
security and in-built support for business
continuity and flexible working.
• Clients for ASP services include businesses,
government organizations, non-profits, and
membership organizations.
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Case Study
• Case Study Week 3
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