Reference Architecture for SMAC solutions

📝 Abstract

Web and internet computing is evolving into a combination of social media, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) solutions. There is a need for an integrated approach when developing solutions that address web scale requirements with technologies that enable SMAC solutions. This paper presents an architecture model for the integrated approach that can form the basis for solutions and result in reuse, integration and agility for the business and IT in an enterprise.

💡 Analysis

Web and internet computing is evolving into a combination of social media, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) solutions. There is a need for an integrated approach when developing solutions that address web scale requirements with technologies that enable SMAC solutions. This paper presents an architecture model for the integrated approach that can form the basis for solutions and result in reuse, integration and agility for the business and IT in an enterprise.

📄 Content

REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR SMAC SOLUTIONS
Shankar Kambhampaty1 and Sasirekha Kambhampaty2 1Computer Science Corporation (CSC), India
skambhampaty@gmail.com
2Student, Department of Computer Science, GRIET, Hyderabad, India ksasirekha@gmail.com

ABSTRACT Web and internet computing is evolving into a combination of social media, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) solutions. There is a need for an integrated approach when developing solutions that address web scale requirements with technologies that enable SMAC solutions. This paper presents an architecture model for the integrated approach that can form the basis for solutions and result in reuse, integration and agility for the business and IT in an enterprise.
KEYWORDS Architecture, Model, Web-scale, Social Media, Mobile, Analytics & Cloud Computing

1. INTRODUCTION The rise of mobile apps has been causing increasing demand for accessing functionality from outside the infrastructure of enterprises. Consumers are demanding information relevant to their context anywhere, anytime, on any device. At the same time, the rise of “Internet of Things” also requires a standard interface for devices to communicate the data captured by different types of devices (such as refrigerators & dish washers) through published interfaces. Additionally, social media applications (Facebook, Twitter etc.) are fast becoming access channels for consumers to interact with products (e.g. Salesforce CRM) and services (such as internet banking) of enterprises. All these taken together constitute web-scale demand that needs to be addressed by solutions of enterprise. Web and internet computing technologies are making significant advances with evolving technologies that may be grouped under four categories – social media, mobile, analytics and cloud computing [1]. Enterprises employ these technologies to deal with the web-scale demand when offering products and services to their customers.
   The problem, however, is that point solutions are being provided in several enterprises without taking a holistic view of the current and future needs of the enterprise leading to “patch work” of the IT in the enterprise thereby increasing the cost in the long run.
   The purpose of this paper is to provide reference architecture to address the above problem and enable in reuse, integration and agility thereby reducing the total cost of ownership for the enterprise.

2. WEB-SCALE DEMAND “Web-scale describes the tendency of modern architectures to grow at (far-) greater-than-linear rates. Systems that claim to be Web-scale are able to handle rapid growth efficiently and not have bottlenecks that require re-architecting at critical moments” [2].
   Some of the sources of web-scale demand are as follows:

1. Data from sensors (such as electricity meters) to applications that manage business processes (e.g. power load management).
2. Consumer devices (such as wearables) that provide data on continuous basis to remote healthcare monitoring systems.
3. Data feeds from social media sites that provide insights on consumer buying behaviour.
4. Mobile devices accessing news sites when sensational events happen round the world. Engineering firms that deal with large number of sensor data and enterprises that provide products and services to a substantial volume of consumers are likely to experience the web- scale demand. Gartner predicts that “By 2017 Web-Scale IT Will Be an Architectural Approach Found Operating in 50 Percent of Global Enterprises” [3]. This is because of the disruption in how, traditionally, business has been conducted and the trend towards digital business models.

3. SMAC SOLUTIONS Several key technology advancements have been taking place in social media, mobile, analytics and cloud computing that are collectively referred to by the term SMAC. Social media platforms are being leveraged by enterprises as one of the access channels for customers. For instance retail banks (such as ICICIBank) provide apps on social media platforms (e.g. Facebook) to allow customers to perform the day-to-day banking transactions. This requires business solutions of the enterprise (e.g. core banking solution) to be integrated with the social media platform to enable large number of transactions to flow through the social media channel [4]. Social media platforms being open to all, can potentially result in millions of transactions that have to be handled in a secure manner over relatively short periods of time. Mobile platforms are presenting both a huge opportunity and significant challenge to large enterprises. It is necessary to provide mobile apps to enterprise users and customers to interact with the enterprise for products and services while supporting a wide variety of mobile operating systems (iOS, Android, Windows etc.) that run on a multitude of devices with varying form factors. The mobile apps have to be continuously

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