Service provider

About: Service provider is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 55107 publications have been published within this topic receiving 894381 citations. The topic is also known as: external service provider & internal service provider.

Method and system for third party resource provisioning management

Abstract: A method and system of provisioning resources from a central location via a third party resource provisioning management (RPM) service provider. Various levels of provisioning may be obtained. Organizations may obtain resource provisioning from a third party RPM resource provider using a third party server. At an affiliate level, various resource vendors may be part of a resource exchange, sharing resources with other affiliates within the exchange. At a public provisioning infrastructure level, an individual organization may obtain access to resources within the infrastructure, subject to receipt of a provisioning ticket and appropriate identity authentication.

Service and technology: opportunities and paradoxes

Abstract: Technology is profoundly changing the nature of services and the ways in which firms interact with their customers. The result, while positive, also has its downside. This paper elaborates on the opportunities that technology presents for firms to develop new services, and provide better, more efficient services to customers as well as the paradoxes and dark side of technology and services. The paper concludes with a section on what customers expect from technology‐delivered services suggesting that “the more things change, the more some things remain the same”. Customers still demand quality service no matter how the firm chooses to structure the relationship. It is incumbent upon firms to develop technology‐based services that can provide the same high level of service that customers expect from interpersonal service providers.

Small-Scale Private Service Providers of Water Supply and Electricity : A Review of Incidence, Structure, Pricing and Operating Characteristics

Abstract: This paper summarizes the key findings and conclusions of a literature review of small-scale private service providers (SPSPs) of water supply and electricity conducted over a six-month period in 2003. It draws on more than 400 documents-including journals, articles, reports, case studies and project reports-which have been disaggregated and referenced in a publicly available database. SPSPs appear most prevalent in countries with low coverage levels, ineffective public utilities that provide inadequate or partial services, and remote, difficult-to-access regions. SPSPs are especially prevalent in post-conflict countries and others with weak or failed states. Of the countries for which evidence of SPSPs was available, at least half fall into this category. SPSP provision of networked services appears to be significantly higher for electricity than for water supply. Most SPSPs identified through the literature are single-purpose entities established for the express purpose of delivering water supply or electricity. SPSPs take a variety of organizational forms, both for-profit and non-profit. As such, they are established for a variety of reasons, including: to meet consumer demand, respond to crises, or as part of larger business ventures. The technology used may extend upstream from distribution services to the means for producing or generating water supply or electricity, so capital needs vary accordingly. The majority of SPSPs have fewer than 50 employees and usually fewer than 10. A lack of affordable financing is a constraint for most SPSPs, which fund investments mainly through their own earnings and savings, loans from friends and family, and money borrowed from formal and informal lenders.

Methods and systems for providing variable rates of service for accessing networks, methods and systems for accessing the internet

Abstract: Systems and methods for providing network access, e.g. Internet access, are described. An architecture includes a host organization network through which network access is provided. The host organization network can be advantageously deployed in public areas such as airports and shopping malls. An authentication/negotiation component is provided for authenticating various users and negotiating for services with service providers on behalf of the system users. The authentication/negotiation component can include one or more specialized servers and a policy manager that contains policies that govern user access to the Internet. An authentication database is provided and authenticates various users of the system. An access module is provided through which individual client computing devices can access the Internet. In one embodiment, the access module comprises individual wireless access points that permit the client computing devices to wirelessly communicate data packets that are intended for the Internet. In one aspect, users are given a variety of choices of different service levels that they can use for accessing the Internet. The service levels can vary in such things as bandwidth allocation and security measures. The various service levels can be purchased by the users using their computing devices.

A Metadata Catalog Service for Data Intensive Applications

Abstract: Advances in computational, storage and network technologies as well as middle ware such as the Globus Toolkit allow scientists to expand the sophistication and scope of data-intensive applications. These applications produce and analyze terabytes and petabytes of data that are distributed in millions of files or objects. To manage these large data sets efficiently, metadata or descriptive information about the data needs to be managed. There are various types of metadata, and it is likely that a range of metadata services will exist in Grid environments that are specialized for particular types of metadata cataloguing and discovery. In this paper, we present the design of a Metadata Catalog Service (MCS) that provides a mechanism for storing and accessing descriptive metadata and allows users to query for data items based on desired attributes. We describe our experience in using the MCS with several applications and present a scalability study of the service.