THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION TO THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE SYSTEM FOR E-BUSINESS OF THE TOURISM ORGANIZATIONS

THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION TO THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE

SYSTEM FOR E-BUSINESS OF THE TOURISM ORGANIZATIONS

Radoslav Miltchev and Melina Neykova University of Forestry, Sofia, Bulgaria

Department of Computer Systems and Informatics

ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe 3rd International Scientific Conference Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of LifeUniversity of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija

The application of contemporary solutions to the field of E-BUSINESS is among the basic preconditions for increasing the competitiveness of organizations and business entities. They must ensure the management of various processes where a key point is to provide accessibility to the information resources and assets of the organizations.

Bulgarian organizations operating in the tourism sector, similar to those operating in the other sectors of the economy, often face problems affecting the formation of their e-business strategy and this is a result of the insufficient assessment of the impact of technological innovations in the area of applied Information аnd Communication Technologies (ICT).

INTRODUCTION


Purpose

Methodology

The main goal of the present study is related to:

• extending the lifecycle of the ICTs of the organization;

• balancing the workload of on-line systems in accordance with their hardware features;

• increasing the level of information security and protection of existing IT assets and resources of the business entities.

For the purposes of the study has been developed a testing environment in accordance with the used standard physical assets that are available to organizations.


Findings

Contribution

The research considers the possibilities of creating an approach for the migration of technological innovations to small and medium-sized enterprises operating in the tourism sector, which affect the sustainability of their e-business system and the formation of their successful business strategy.

The expansion and the provision of a secure and reliable access to the online e-business resources of the tourism organizations;

At the same time the study is part of intelligent practices in information technology which help reduce the harmful impacts on the environment as a key aspect of applying the basic principles of sustainable development to which we aspire today.


Аbout half of the small enterprises in BulgariaAnd 60 % of medium-sized enterprises in the country have WEBSITES.

A TREND IN THE AVAILABILITY OF E-BUSINESS WEBSITES

According to the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute (NSI)

The analysis of statistical data on the e-business resources used by the organizations in the Republic of Bulgaria, including those in the tourism sector, indicates that at present the existing tendency is towards the massive use of

WEBSITES.


Оver the past decade the percentage of organizations on the territory of the Republic of Bulgaria that use e-commerce has increased.

A TREND IN THE USE OF E-BUSINESS RESOURCES AND SERVICES

According to the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute (NSI)


The WEBSITES are particularly important for tourism companies. And today every manager knows that the correct positioning of the e-business resources allows them to build a reputation on the Internet and provides immediate opportunities to increase the number of potential customers, partners and contractors.

The obligatory information systems that should be supported are websites containing elements, such as:

electronic catalogues of the services provided;online booking tools;electronic payment tools;feedback forms, etc.

For this purpose, the organizations will necessarily have to ensure the maintenance of these systems through WEB-SERVERS.

A TREND IN THE USE OF E-BUSINESS RESOURCES AND SERVICES


RESEARCH PROBLEM

A large part of the companies operating in the tourism sector and in other sectors of the economy are small and medium-sized enterprises. In Bulgaria the percentage of micro, small and medium enterprises is 99.8% (SBA, 2014).

It is difficult for such organisations to rely on an ICT development and deployment department within the organization most often due to the shortage of staff, possessing the appropriate competencies and eventually they experience difficulties taking advantage of innovative solutions in this area.

Depending on the organization policy the main systems that are used for e-business (website content management systems, customer relationship management systems, enterprise resource planning systems, etc.) at this stage usually exist in the form of a resource which operates on one single physical machine.


RESEARCH PROBLEM

This machine becomes the single potential point where damage can occur, including overload due to increased consumer seasonal activity or physical damage to the hardware equipment, and whose failure may result in a complete denial of service.

Ultimately this is directly related to thepotential possibility of losses and missed business benefits as well as in the possibility of diminished goodwill in the eyes of customers, contractors and partners to the tourism organizations .

This places at the forefront the need to ensure the resources and services in continuous mode 24/7 (twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week).


RESEARCH SOLUTION Balancing the workload of online resources, for example as a result of

the seasonal nature of some services when increased the number of user requests for access to the online services. Thus the requirements in the tourism industry can be successfully met.

Increasing the productivity of existing servers from the lower class, so that they can be commensurate with servers from the higher class.

The environmentally-oriented intelligent practices in information technology.

It is directly related to reducing the amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment as it is currently one of the fastest growing waste streams in the EU and is a priority under the WEEE Directive (Waste electrical and electronic equipment, Eurostat, 2013).


RESEARCH SOLUTION

In order to reduce ICT costs, this approach allows to use both:

• existing computer equipment in the office, which is generally used by the employees as part of their daily work and at present it can go into full operation;

• or reuse of computer equipment, which is no longer actively used,because they are being replaced with new ones, but it is not yet completely rejectable.

Requires minimum investments in software - it uses widely available open source solutions - FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).


The scheme shows the studied e-business scenario and includes the most complicated possible option of implementing a Three-Tier Architecture for access to the information system.

OVERVIEW OF THE STUDIED SCHEME

The business part of the Three-tier Architecture of the e-business platform is installed on the group of developed cluster nodes (Node 1, Node 2, ..., Node N). For this purpose a content management system was installed on the nodes- Joomla version 3.3 (Joomla, 2015).

The database which is used by the content management system is installed and configured on a separate server.


OVERVIEW OF THE STUDIED SCHEME

For the proposed approach was installed and configured a server for balancing online service user requests. It works in two different test modes:

• balancing (suitable in cases where the nodes of the cluster used have similar hardware features);

• unequal load balancing (suitable in cases where the cluster is constructed using heterogeneous computer systems with different hardware parameters).

The proposed solution was tested in a real working environment in which were conducted series of experiments, which have been organised into two main groups:


USED APPROACHES TO THE RESEARCH SOLUTION FIRST GROUP

The nodes forming the cluster were created using the dual boot computer systems in which UBUNTU Server 14.04 LTS was uploaded as a second operating system, which operates on a 30 GB partition. The operating system does not have a graphical interface in order to limit the consumption of a useful resource, and it operates on a machine with a dual core processor and 2 GB RAM. This approach allows the tourist company to use both outdated computer systems that not yet completely rejectable and newer systems.

SECOND STUDIED GROUP

The nodes forming a cluster are uploaded on virtual machines, working on real machines that are used by employees in the tourism organization to perform their daily work, without limiting their access to the systems. It is appropriate when the organization has more contemporary technical equipment. In the present case, the machines are with four-core processors and 4 GB RAM.


PHYSICAL TOPOLOGY OF THE TEST ENVIRONMENT

Physical Topology of the test environment.

The studied cluster was formed by three nodes that communicated with the balancing server and the database server. In the present case the requests from external users are directed towardsa balancing server which manages traffic and redirects it to the nodes of the internal network that form the cluster. The nodes send back a response which gives access to the resources of the tourist company - home page, page for making on-line reservations, e-catalog, etc.


TESTING THE PROPOSED SOLUTION

The productivity of the environment was tested using the Apache Benchmark tool (AB, 2015). For the purposes of the study, a sequence of 10,000 requests made by 1,000 competitive users simultaneously was generated. This is significantly higher than the number of requests made to travel sites of Bulgarian organizations in the sector, especially of small and medium businesses.

The load to the nodes was examined using standard command line tools. The system resources were tested with the tool htop (Htop, 2015), and the load on the network controller of the individual nodes was tested using the bmon (Bmon, 2015).


When using one system in the unbalanced mode, in order to process 350 KiB (RX) of received requests within 20 seconds, the machine returned content in the amount of 1055 KiB (TX). On the other hand, when using the balanced load method for the same period of time, these values are reduced more than threefold in relation to the number of nodes which are used for balancing the load.

Ultimately, the results indicate that the reduction of the load of the individual nodes is proportional to the number of the nodes that are used for equal load balancing.

Balanced Load Unbalanced Load


The presented solution, as part of the strategy for e-business development, ensures reliable and continuous access to online e-business resources (24/7) and provides opportunities for SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS EXPANSION and for significantly improving the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises in the tourism sector.

In view of the economic crisis in recent years, which has affected all sectors of the economy, the present research is focused on reducing costs and investments in new computer technologies by stimulating the reuse of computer resources in organizations.

In addition, the presented solution is а step towards sustainable use of computer equipment by organizations. It contributes to improving environmental and economic indicators as an essential part of the implementation of the basic principles of sustainable development to which we must strive today.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS

Thank you for your attention!

Melina Neykova, M. Eng, PhD studentE-mail: [email protected]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This document was supported by the grant No BG051PO001-3.3.06-0056, financed by the Human Resources Development Operational Programme (2007 – 2013) and co-financed jointly by the European Social Fund of the European Union and the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science.

UNIVERSITY OF FORESTRY, Sofia, BulgariaFaculty of Business Management, Department of Computer Systems and Informatics,

Radoslav Miltchev, Ph.D., Assoc.ProfessorE-mail: [email protected]

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THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION TO THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE SYSTEM FOR E-BUSINESS OF THE TOURISM ORGANIZATIONS