Infrastructure for Electronic Business on the Internet

The rapidly growing field of Electronic Business on the Internet (EBI) includes a number of subfields, such as electronic commerce, electronic multimedia, workflow technologies, and collaboration technologies. The term electronic business implies a synergistic interaction between a number of different fields with the purpose of maximizing not only the short term profit, but the long term profit as well. In order to establish technical prerequisites for efficient electronic business on the Internet, appropriate system support is needed. This work discusses the topic of system support and its main bottlenecks, stressing explanations that link the newly emerging problems with those found in the general computer architecture field. Attention is dedicated to both hardware and software issues and their symbiotic interactions. "Infrastructure for Electronic Business on the Internet" is a useful reference for researchers and practitioners and may also be used as a text for advanced courses on the topic.