Friday, February 21, 2020

WalMart's profile of computing and network infrastructure Essay

WalMart's profile of computing and network infrastructure - Essay Example So our ties to Bentonville, Ark. - where Sam Walton opened the first store that bore the Walton name and where Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., is still based - give us our foundation. Another Walmart.com goal - providing easy access to more Wal-Mart - is evident in the more than 1,000,000 products available online and in the innovative businesses that Walmart.com continues to develop, such as Music Downloads and 1-Hour Photos, which gives customers the convenience of ordering products online and picking them up at a local Wal-Mart. In short, Walmart.com is passionate about combining the best of two great worlds - technology and world-class retailing - to give customers a wide assortment of their favorite products, Every Day Low Prices, guaranteed satisfaction, friendly service, convenient hours (24 hours, 7 days a week) and a great online shopping experience. According to Mark Schmidt, senior director for information services at Wal-Mart, the installation of NCR System 3000 processors -- which began last month in the Springfield, Mo., stores -- is the second phase of a systems upgrade at the chain that began in August 1990 with the installation of Hewlett-Packard's HP 9000 Model 375 system. The retailer chose to purchase both systems so that "we have two vendor partners to bank on," said Schmidt. Approximately 800 of Wal-Mart's stores will use the HP system and the other 800 will use the NCR system. Both models are open-system computers and both use the UNIX operating system, allowing intercommunications and compatibility. "We can take data tapes from one to the other if we had to," Schmidt added. Tony Fano, vice president of NCR Retail Systems Division, said, "The NCR 3445 support of UNIX V.4 matches Wal-Mart's UNIX open systems strategy. Because it is based on industry standards, the NCR 3445 can provide enterprise-wide computing solutions based on open systems components and cooperative processing." NCR's System 3000 is a seven-level family of scalable, compatible, general purpose computer systems that support the industry-standard operating systems -- UNIX V.4, SCO UNIX, OS/2 and MS-DOS. Wal-Mart had been using the IBM Series 1, which was installed in 1979. "It is a proprietary system. We wanted something more open, so we could be independent of a vendor if we needed to be, said Schmidt. "We needed a system with more capacity. We wanted one that was open and scalable -- to go in relatively small and then grow," said Schmidt. The installation of the HP 9000 Model 375 was completed last month, according to Schmidt. He said the chain is aiming at Aug. 1 completion of the NCR installation. The NCR 3445 will provide connections between NCR and non-NCR point-of-sale controllers and pharmacy systems with Wal-Mart's central computer in its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. The NCR and HP systems are configured to support up to 16 terminals in a Wal-Mart store. According to Schmidt, the systems currently are doing traditional applications, such as payroll, general accounting and merchandise reorder. Potential applications include financial management, sales analysis and labor management (Tahmincioglu, 1991). Wal-Mart has signed a multimillion

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Survey online travel agencies Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Survey online travel agencies - Essay Example The second type is the 'blind' sites which are similar to open sites but they allow a customer to bid a price, a location or a time to get his/her ticket reservation but a user may not know the airline, departure time or specific hotel until the actual ticket is bought. These websites also have the normal search functionality where a customer can view the travel fares without bidding. The third type of online travel sites are merely search engines popularly known as 'meta search engines' (Rand, 2006). The term means that they search other sites which provide air travel. The search engine goes through all available online travel agencies websites (open sites) and finds the best results for the user. (CR, 2008) As mentioned above, there are three types of online travel agencies. These agencies fight within themselves to get the highest market share (Rand, 2006). For the analysis sake, the business strategy is compared according to these types. Popular open sites include agencies like Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity amongst others. Orbitz (www.orbitz.com) strategy is to market itself in the eco-tourism and beats the other two companies in terms of thoroughness and provides car rentals and hotel reservations at guaranteed prices. Expedia (www.expedia.com) is a highly rated site which offers extra benefits to the customers like rewards for frequent flyers, going to less-common foreign routes and awards programs. Travelocity's (www.Travelocity.com) website is easily customizable to find what the user wants. Best fares, time frame and different combinations of airline, hotels, car rentals etc. can be entered as search parameters and found easily. (CR, 2008) Blind Sites Two popular blind sites are there in the category, Priceline and Hotwire. Priceline's (www.priceline.com) strategy is to let travelers bid a price on where and when they want to fly. The website then searches for all available seats on any airline matching the cost, time and the destination. The bid can be rejected if the bid is too low, where a traveler can increase the bid and try again in 24 hours. Due to the inconvenience of not knowing the exact time of departure and airline, Priceline is best option only for people who are flexible and need a low cost travelling solution. On the other hand, Hotwire (www.hotwire.com) is successful on its own strategy. Travelers can select a tourism package complete with hotel and car reservation without knowing the airline or the hotel. However by specifying the location radius, the website can choose the best priced hotel within that radius. The site also offers consultancy with the help of historical trends which makes Hotwire more interesting and better in terms of customer perception. (CR, 2008) Search Engines Travel search engines like Kayak and Yahoo! FareChase are two of the most popular Meta search engines. Kayak (www.kayak.com) plays on its extra features like finding the lowest fares from a traveler's closest airport. Their deals with hotels and airlines return a very good price for the customers. Its most helpful feature includes the fare comparison tool that lets a customer check the lowest fares that other passengers paid for similar routes and to compare search results against those found on other open or blind sites. Yahoo!