Having its origins in the excesses occurred in the Western financial system, the global crisis has affected the world economic circuit as a whole and thus its most dynamic flux: the international trade in goods. After the sharp and synchronized downturn of the transactions in 2009, the world...

Lots of business experts have great ideas about the ways in which Web technologies can be used to enhance customer/partner relationships, increase market share, enhance competitive advantage, etc. However, many of these e-business ideas never take shape simply because it was so difficult to...

The main aim of this paper is to show how e-business represents an order of magnitude increase in the complexity and sophistication of systems used by large organisations and how the patterns can resolve this. The most significant contributing factor to this complexity is the high degree of...

Today, in the new economy, while the possibilities for software are seemingly limitless, so is the growing demand. The problem is that speed and quality have typically been opposing forces in software development, and they still are. In the past, businesses could sacrifice software quality to...

Firms need flexible software applications, which may be adaptable to dynamic changes of the modern business environment; they also need more control over their software costs, security and trust in purchased and implemented software. Moreover, they need to be free of individual software vendors...