The increased reliance of companies on IT outsourcing has turned management attention to a set of skills of managing relationships with service providers. While practitioners proclaimed that a key to managing outsourcing relationships was with SLA, there existed very little understanding of how effectiveness and impact of SLA on IT outsourcing arrangements was measured. Using a conceptual frame...

The goal of this study is to provide a global view of Spanish second language (L2) accent and to identify the sounds and structures that lead to the perception of foreign accent. We designed a list of real Spanish monosyllabic words with various syllable structures that covers all phonemes in Spanish. The words were produced by L2 learners and native speakers and rated by native listeners. We u...

the purpose of the study is to evaluate the service quality of islamic azad university of mazandaran. the study was a descriptive survey. the statistical population consists of all islamic azad university students of mazandaran and 373 students were chosen through stratified random sampling method as the sample of the study. the data were collected using the servqual standardized questionnaire....

With growing importance of e-service platforms, enhanced Service Level Management (SLM) concepts are required, paying respect to the service providers‟ autonomy as important source for value creation within a platform ecosystem. This paper proposes a highly automated SLM concept, wherein traditional direct control mechanisms are complemented by indirect mechanisms, including reputation systems,...

Motivated by an application in thinwire visualization, we study an abstract on-line scheduling problem where the size of each requested service can be scaled down by the scheduler. We give two schedulers FirstFit and EndFit based on two simple heuristics, and generalize them into a class of greedy schedulers. We show that both FirstFit and EndFit are 2-competitive, and any greedy scheduler is 3...

The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) extends the Global System Mobile Communication (GSM) by introducing a packet-switched transmission service. This paper analyzes the GPRS behavior under critical conditions. In particular, we focus on outages, which significantly impact the GPRS dependability. In fact, during outage periods, the cumulative number of users trying to access the service grows...

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are contracts co-signed by an Application Service Provider (ASP) and the end user(s) to regulate the services delivered through the Internet. They contain several clauses establishing for example the level of the services to guarantee, also known as quality of service (QoS) parameters and the penalties to apply in case the requirements are not met during the SLA ...