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Information Sheet 2.1: Current Industry Hardware and Software Products and Services

What Is the Software Service Industry?

The software service industry can be divided into industries of application system software design and development, system integration services, e-commerce, data processing services, and channel distribution.

Industrial chain of software service industry is carried out as application system software design and development companies are engaged in various fields of application software; system integrator companies are responsible for the integration of hardware and software service series and technical services consulting; e-commerce is a business transaction activity conducted on the Internet; data processing service companies provide the establishment of database information, retrieval, and analysis services, website hosting, and other related businesses; channel distributors are engaged in various software agency sales businesses.

Application System Software Design and Development

Mainly to meet the customer’s operational needs, to develop specific application system software, including application software developed by specific industries, such as financial, medical, and distribution industries; or special application software developed by software functions, such as business intelligence (BI), enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), information security, etc.

System Integration Service

System integrations are typically defined as the process of linking together various IT systems, services, and software to make them work functionally together. They are provided thru system integrator companies in various business areas.

E-Commerce

It belongs to the electronic and networked aspects of traditional business activities. E-commerce includes order processing through the Internet, payment of goods through the Internet, the transmission of logistics information through the Internet, supply chain management, online marketing and transactions, online transaction processing, electronic data exchange, inventory management, automatic data collection systems, etc. E-commerce includes three business models. One is to provide technology and platform to enterprises, called business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce services; the other is to directly provide business services to the consumer and purchase in its online stores, called business Consumer-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce services; both buyers and sellers are individuals who conduct transactions through auction sites, which is called consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce services. B2B service is to use the portal website to provide a technical platform to stores that do not operate an online business.

Data Processing Services

Data Processing Services refers to data backup, recovery, repeated data backup, and provision of website hosting services. Because the computer system is composed of many components, any component failure may cause data damage or loss, and whether it is natural disasters or man-made damage, it may cause the system to crash and become unusable. Therefore, the data processing service is to maintain corporate information. Security is a very important mechanism, and it also promotes market opportunities for solving enterprise information security solutions; as enterprises gradually become electronic, the product and service ecosystem of the information security system is gradually improved; and with the changes in technology and application scenarios, cloud computing in the future In the era of, 5G and the Internet of Everything, for firewalls, user and physical device behavior analysis, endpoint detection and response, information security coordination, automation and response, network traffic analysis and other related technologies, with cloud computing, 5G, and the Internet of Things , Big data, Internet of Vehicles, Industrial control and other scenarios, and there are quite different information security practices to respond, it is estimated that it will drive the development of new information security technology and market opportunities.

Channel Distribution Provide packaged software sales, including commercial software, development software, office application software, etc. for domestic and foreign brand owners. It also provides customer-related software education and training to help customers and consumers use the software sold by the agency.

What Is the Cloud Computing Industry?

The cloud is the Internet constructed by the server, which has more powerful computing power. It receives user commands through the network to serve many end-users. The purpose of setting up the server is mainly to facilitate users to execute online applications, storage, and management. A lot of information. The four deployment models of cloud computing can be divided into public cloud, private cloud, social cloud, and hybrid cloud. As the epidemic affects global business interactions, the transformation of remote office and online meetings has accelerated the use of the cloud, and cloud business opportunities such as mobile applications, huge amounts of data, and social media are endless.

Information Sheet 1.2: Industry Maintenance, Service and Helpdesk Practices, Processes and Procedures

Maintenance Procedures and Their Importance

Procedures, in the broadest sense, are the way something is performed, that is, a technique, process, or method of work. In industrial environments, these tools are widely used in the search for certain patterns of routine tasks and execution.

It’s common for people to refer to procedures as work instructions, which they are, but technically there’s a difference.

A procedure is a description of the activities involved in the flow of a job. In other words, it’s a macro and standardized script of all the activities of a process. And the Work Instruction (WI) is a detailed description of a single activity.

How important are procedures?

It’s necessary to establish a policy that governs their use and how to deal with possible deviations. Normally, the company’s quality area is in charge of these policies. And for each new one, all maintenance team involved must be informed and trained on the procedure.

Maintenance procedures or even work instructions are extremely important and must identify pre-conditions, precautions and provide clear instructions so that the work to be done doesn’t deviate.

All this to ensure that the flow is carried out in accordance with your operations’ strategy. To perform maintenance, the procedures must be technically accurate, properly verified, validated, authorized and reviewed.

Initially, we can classify them into two types:

Management;
Legal.

Management Procedures

For management, we can develop some procedures to establish a pattern of important activities, such as:

Expense control (direct purchases and stock): an important document to demonstrate the seriousness and commitment the team has when it comes to expenses. In this procedure, we can define how to control the emission, follow-up and receipt of direct purchase requests. And in the case of stock parts and supplies, it’s possible to establish how the use of these resources should be. In both cases, it’s necessary to determine both the responsibilities and the documents necessary for the flow of these activities.
Failure analysis: important document with certain assumptions of when and how to carry out failure analysis. Define the entire flow of this activity, responsible parties, and deadlines, among other things.
Preventive plans: the definition of how scheduled maintenance and predictive maintenance is handled. It’s an important document that meets the ISO 9001 standard, as it specifies how maintenance addresses asset needs.

Legal Order Procedures

Here the procedures meet some regulatory or legal standards. Without them, accidents or disasters could compromise the company. We can name a few:

Contingency plans: some standards such as ISO 9001 and IATF 16949 establish that you need for a contingency plan. In other words, a method must be developed on how to act in situations of great impact on your manufacturing operations.
Safety inspections: in this case, they’re the appropriate procedures to meet legal inspection requirements, sustained by regulations. For example, there are the inspections defined in NR-13 regarding pressure vessels and boilers.

Information Sheet 2.3: Operating Systems

Different Operating Systems

1. MS-DOS: which is short for Microsoft Disk Operating System is a non-graphical command line operating system developed for IBM compatible computers with x86 microprocessor. The operating system used a command line interface for the user to input commands to navigate, open, and manipulate files on their computer.

Features:

It is a single user operating system meaning only one user can operate at a time.
It is a light weight operating system allowing users to have direct access to the BIOS and its underlying hardware.
Loads data and programs from external sources and bring them into the internal memory so they can be used on the computer.
Enables the computer to perform input and output operations such as taking commands from keyboard, printing information on the screen.
It is very helpful in making file management like creating, editing, deleting files, etc.
It also controls and manages other external devices such as the printer, keyboard or external hard drive using various drive utilities.

Drawbacks:

It does not allow multiple users to operate on the system.
It does not support graphical interface hence mouse cannot be used to operate it.
It does not support multiprogramming meaning it can only have one process in the ram.
It lacked memory protection which meant no security, and less stability.
It has difficulty in memory access when addressing more than 640 MB of RAM.

2. Windows Operating System: Designed by Microsoft to be used on a standard x86 Intel and AMD processors. It provides an interface, known as a graphical user interface (GUI) which eliminates the need to memorize commands for the command line by using a mouse to navigate through menus, dialog boxes, buttons, tabs, and icons. The operating system was named windows since the programs are displayed in the shape of a square. This Windows operating system has been designed for both a novice user just using at home as well as for professionals who are into development.

Features:

It is designed to run on any standard x86 Intel and AMD hence most of the hardware vendors make drivers for windows like Dell, HP, etc.
It supports enhanced performance by utilizing multi-core processors.
It comes preloaded with many productivity tools which helps to complete all types of everyday tasks on your computer.
Windows has a very large user base so there is a much larger selection of available software programs, utilities.
Windows is backward compatible meaning old programs can run on newer versions.
Hardware is automatically detected eliminating need of manually installing any device drivers.

Drawbacks:

Windows can be expensive since the OS is paid license and majority of its applications are paid products.
Windows has high computer resource requirement like it should have high ram capacity, a lot of hard drive space and good graphics card.
Windows slows and hangs up if the user loads up many programs at the same time.
Windows includes network sharing that can be useful if user has a network with many PCs.
Windows is vulnerable to virus attacks since it has a huge user base and users have to update OS to keep up-to-date with security patches.

3. LINUX Operating System: is an open source operating system project that is a freely distributed, cross-platform operating system developed based on UNIX. This operating system is developed by Linus Torvalds. The name Linux comes from the Linux kernel. It is basically the system software on a computer that allows apps and users to perform some specific task on the computer. The development of Linux operating system pioneered the open source development and became the symbol of software collaboration.

Features:

Linux is free can be downloaded from the Internet or redistribute it under GNU licenses and has the best community support.
Linux OS is easily portable which means it can be installed on various types of devices like mobile, tablet computers.
It is a multi-user, multitasking operating system.
BASH is the Linux interpreter program which can be used to execute commands.
Linux provides multiple levels of file structures i.e. hierarchical structure in which all the files required by the system and those that are created by the user are arranged.
Linux provides user security using authentication features and also threat detection and solution is very fast because Linux is mainly community driven.

Drawbacks:

There’s no standard edition of Linux hence confusing for users and also becoming familiar with the Linux may be a problem for new users.
More difficult to find applications to support user needs since Linux does not dominate the market.
Since some applications are developed specifically for Windows and Mac, those might not be compatible with Linux and sometimes users might not have much of a choice to choose between different applications like in Windows or Mac since most apps are developed for operating systems that have a huge user base.
Some hardware may not be incompatible with Linux since it has patchier support for drivers which may result in malfunction.
There are plenty of forums to resolve Linux issues, but it may not always match the user’s own level of technical understanding.

4. Solaris Operating System: Solaris or SunOS is the name of the Sun company’s Unix variant operating system that was originally developed for its family of Scalable Processor Architecture-based processors (SPARC) as well as for Intel-based processors. The UNIX workstation market had been largely dominated by this operating system during its time. As the Internet grew Sun’s Solaris systems became the most widely installed servers for Web sites. Oracle purchased Sun and later renamed to Oracle Solaris.

Features:

Solaris is known for its scalability. It can handle a large workload and still delivers indisputable performance advantages for database, Web, and Java technology-based services.
Solaris systems were known to their availability meaning that these operating systems hardly crashes at any time and because of its internet networking oriented design and broad scope of features it makes the job of adding new features or fixing any problems easy.
It is built for network computing as it provides optimized network stack and support for advanced network computing protocols that delivers high-performance networking to most applications.
Solaris has advanced, unique security capabilities which includes some of the world’s most advanced security features, such as user rights management, cryptographic Framework and secure by default networking that allows users to safely deliver new solutions.
Provides tools to enable seamless interoperability, test new software and efficiently consolidate application workloads.

Drawbacks:

Solaris is quite expensive since it’s an enterprise operating system. Also, Solaris doesn’t provide updates for free.
Solaris lacks a good graphical user interface support and is not user friendly.
Hardware support is not nearly as good as many other operating systems.
Performance would degrade considerably since Solaris cannot make use of different hardware that efficiently.
Solaris sometimes becomes unstable and crashes due to total consumption of CPU and memory.

5. Symbian Operating System: was the most widely-used smartphone operating system in the world based on ARM architecture, until it was discontinued in 2014. It was developed by Symbiant Ltd, which was a partnership among PDA devices and smartphone manufacturers like Psion, Motorola, Ericsson, and Nokia. The Symbian Operating System was developed of two sub system where the first is the microkernel-based operating system with its associated libraries, and the other being interface of the OS with which the user interacts. It was explicitly developed for smartphones and hand held digital devices since this operating system consumes very low power, battery-based devices and also for ROM-based systems.

Features:

Its kernel known as EKA2 features preemptive multithreading, scheduling, memory management system and device drivers.
Allows third party software to enhance the platform for better performance of the operating system.
Symbian Interface is easy to use and very user friendly.
Applications for Symbian are normally written in C++ or Symbian C++ using Symbian Software Development Kit (SDK).
Symbian can also run applications written in Python, Java ME, Flash Lite, Ruby and .NET.
Connectivity is lot easier and faster.
Symbian OS has good efficiency and stability.

Drawbacks:

Responsiveness is not smooth and sensitive as other operating systems.
The Symbian OS is very vulnerable and can be easily affected by a Virus.
Lack of virtual memory.

6. Android Mobile Operating System:

Android is a Google’s Linux based operating system it is designed primarily for touch screen mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet computers. The hardware which can be used to support android is based on three architectures namely ARM, Intel and MIPS design lets users manipulate the mobile devices intuitively, with finger movements that mirror common motions, such as pinching, swiping, and tapping making these applications comfortable for the users.

Features:

The android operating system is an open source operating system means that it’s free and any one can use it.
Android offers optimized 2D and 3D graphics, multimedia, GSM connectivity, multi-tasking.
Android OS is known for its friendly user interface and exceptional customizable according to the user’s taste.
Huge choice of applications for its users since Playstore offers over one million apps.
Software developers who want to create applications for the Android OS can download the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) to easily develop apps for android.
Android would consume very little power but deliver extreme performance since its hardware is based on ARM architecture.

Drawbacks:

The design and coding of intuitive modern user experiences and interfaces poses a difficulty because of its dependency on Java.
Most apps tend to run in the background even when closed by the user draining the battery.
Performance is bound to take a hit as multiple programs run simultaneously in the background at any given time.
Android phones overheat especially when indulged in hardcore productivity tasks or heavy graphics.
Apps have lower security profiles and make users more susceptible to data breaches.

7. iOS Mobile Operating System:

iOS which is short for iPhone OS is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware like A12 Bionic chip that presently powers many of its mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod. The iOS user interface is based upon using multi-touch gestures such as swipe, tap, pinch, and reverse pinch. The purpose of these finger actions is to provide the user with fast responsive inputs given from multiple fingers to the multi-touch capacitive screen display.

Features:

It is written in C, C++, Objective-C and Swift and is based on the Macintosh OS X.
Has excellent and intuitive user interface and very fluid response.
Performance of iOS is unbeatable.
iOS comes with a lot of default apps, including an email client, web browser, media player and the phone app.
Availability of higher quality apps which can be downloaded from the Appstore.
Apple has provided its own iOS software development kit (SDK) for the developers to create applications for Apple mobile devices.
iOS is much safer than other mobile operating systems and has fewer security breaches as well.
Provides regular updates and security patches.

Drawbacks:

The OS is closed source instead of open source hence beta testing taking a lot of time since its only available to limited developers.
The amount of memory space the iOS applications occupy is very large when compared with other mobile platforms.
Lack of customization compared to other operating systems.
Doesn’t allow third party installations.
Having intense graphics and animations consumes more power and causes battery drains.
iOS is resource intensive operating system due to which older devices struggle to run it.