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The digital manufacturing process based on the Digital Twin is a new approach that will forever shape the future of the Industry 4.0. This innovative concept is based on well-known technologies that already power the cloud-based economy: Big Data, Machine Learning and Data Science techniques. We present a Digital Twin model for manufacturing and the stages involved to build it. Currently, many Digital Twin solutions are available on the IT market, which contribute to the successful implementation of the technology in different industries. Our study presents the features and benefits of several dedicated Digital Twin software applications for the current-day business environment. Our case study involves the trial version of the ARIS software platform, that allows the construction of a DT model and we are emphasizing the possibilities offered by this new approach for the manufacturing future.

This paper aims to describe the concept of applying Artificial Intelligence to IT Operations (AIOps) and its main components, Big Data, Machine Learning and Trend Analysis. The concept was implemented by developing a multi-layered fusion of the technologies that powers the components in AIOps platforms present on the IT market. The core of an AIOps platform is represented by the Big Data organization structure and by a massive parallel data processing platform like Apache Hadoop. The ML component of the platform is able to infer the future behaviour and the regular operations that are performed from the large volume of collected data, in order to develop the ability to automate the activities. AIOps platforms find their place especially in very complex IT infrastructures, ones that require constant monitoring and quick decisions in case of failures. The case study is based on the Moogsoft AIOps platform, and its features are presented in detail, using the Cloud trial version, clearly showing the potential of such an advanced tool for infrastructure monitoring and reporting. The experiment was focused on the way Moogsoft is monitoring computing resources, is handling events and records alerts for the defined timespan, alerts grouped by category (like web services, social media, networking). The platform is also able to display at any given moment the unresolved situations and their type of origin, and includes automated remediation tools. The study presents the features of this software category, consisting in benefits for the business environment and their integration into the Internet-of-Things model. Keywords: Big Data, Machine Learning, AIOps, business performance.

The banking sectors of the Central and Eastern European countries performed better than other developed European sectors during the crisis, due to their sound capitalization and a high profitability before the crisis. However, some of those banking systems were very hit in terms of the non-performing loans ratio or cost-to-income ratio. That is why we consider that it is interesting to see how they performed in terms of the banking performance ratios during the last years in the light of the new international capital adequacy regulations and in the light of the latest national macroeconomic developments of those economies and what are the main threats for these CEE banking sectors in the present.

In this paper, the authors aim to present the concept of DevOps (Development & Operations), considering its degree of novelty in the area of project management. Firstly, the authors will bring theoretical arguments to support the idea that DevOps is an early-stage methodology, built on the Agile principles, but coming with its own contributions in project management for software development and implementation. Therefore, we believe that after a short time, DevOps will replace its predecessors. Secondly, we experienced this methodology by developing a small project in academic environment by three teams of master students, using VersionOne software. The Conclusions will emphasize the relevance and the future expected effects of DevOps methodology in the project management domain.

This paper aims to demonstrate, in a theoretical and practical manner, the flexibility and efficiency of using the Agile methodology in software engineering. The study will present the new methodology versus a traditional one (Project Management Body of Knowledge—PMBOK), outlining the advantages and drawbacks of each of them. The case study will focus on using two different methodologies (PMBOK and Agile) for the same project. It is a small, free software-based project that will be designed in the academic environment by two teams of master students (one for each methodology) during their one-semester project management class. In the conclusions part, we will summarize the results and emphasize the way we see the future of software development area, and then we will lay out future work directions.

The paper follows three main directions: business intelligence – as a software tool, companies – as an application field and top management – as target of intelligent efforts. From this symbiosis does result an advantage, scientific and data based educational tool, having the goal to give the students a tool to explore data collections and analysis methods in order to improve the management of a company and forecast its evolution. The purpose of Business Intelligence (BI) software is to help the firms on acquiring knowledge about highlights and dangerous trends, to observe the connections and to forecast the future market evolutions. From this perspective, we consider that students need to learn theory and practical application about BI. After an overview of the BI main concepts, we choose to use the facilities of Jaspersoft BI software; to model the most frequently used analysis requirements, displaying the most relevant data and key indicators, following the steps of a BI system.

This paper uses Gartner Group's Hype Cycle as an analysis tool for the e-learning platform integration process at the University of Pitesti. The platform was installed three years ago and during this time there were many points of view (by major user groups) regarding the usefulness and adoption rate. Based on this fact, according to us, the e-learning Hype Cycle has two graphical representations, two variation curves that have the first part identical but differ significantly in the following two stages, differences that disappear in the end. Based on our analysis, we found necessary to improve the management strategies, to better motivate the teachers in order for them to reach the same level of interested shown by the students in using the system, and thus bringing the two educational groups to the same opinion. We have depicted all this evolution and the different points of view by the Hype Cycle curve, that should be only one for the 5th year of system presence in our institution, a convergence reached a bit too late in the IT world, where software solutions have a limited life cycle. Keywords: Hype Cycle, e-learning, academic collaboration

As a consequence of the economic crisis, the funds allocated for the development of the IT&C infrastructure in all domains become scarcer, whilst the need for computing services increases day by day and becomes a key factor in the existence and success of any institution or company.In the later years, new computing technologies have reached the market, technologies that allow transparent sharing of the physical resources and of the services for their users, like Grid computing paradigms, and lately Cloud infrastructures.In this paper we will conduct a comparative analysis of the architectures and services offered by the two kinds of technologies, aiming to determine if they can give a real competitive advantage to the academic environments through their cost/performance benefits.

During the last years, the global economic crisis has affected all domains, including the health sector. Many governments have considered that the solution to this problem is to reduce public expenses on healthcare, to decrease the budgets for health services, to rationalize the medical plans for the population, to increase the share of health expenditure paid by patients and to select the products on the pharmaceutical market. In order to improve the medical service whilst maintaining reduced infrastructure costs, the new digital technologies offer the solution of cloud-based services for the e-health systems. In this paper we present the cloud-hosted healthcare applications concept, the advantages of using e-Health on distributed platforms and some considerations about the security levels. Also, we further present an experiment based on the free OpenEMR solution, which has also a cloud version, ZH-Services OpenEMR.

Credit cooperatives in Romania are a category of non-banking financial institutions. The first forms of credit cooperatives emerged in nineteenth century. The credit cooperative system has its own cooperative self-help mechanism. Central House of Credit Cooperatives represents a credit institution established by the association of credit cooperatives, in order to manage their common interests, to track compliance with applicable laws and regulations for all affiliated cooperatives, by exercising administrative, technical and financial supervision and control on their operations.

In the clothing and fashion industry, decisions must be made faster than in other industries because the accelerated pace of change in the consumer's life translates into the need for new apparel styles. It is important for managers to have the complete and correct opinions and feedback from their clients as soon as possible to make the right decisions. Big companies and even small and medium enterprises have their own information systems, which deliver sales reports, graphics, statistics, and forecasts. Also, they have an Internet portal for e-commerce and for communicating with their customers. But this is not enough. Data must be completed with the information circulating on social media, which could give the management another type of insight and would increase the competitiveness in the target field by improving the creative industry, the involvement of potential customers in style design, and in defining utility, quality, and comfort for new products. This chapter is structured into four sections to achieve our research objectives: first, an overview of the actual stage of Romanian clothing and fashion industry, and second, a study of competitiveness improvement in Romanian apparel using new information technology and communication technologies and a theoretical solution to explore social media information, considered as a significant factor in decision-making. In the third section is presented the Romanian clothing industry face-to-face with the economic crisis, as well as its slow but steady recovery since 2013. Also, this part is intended to provide several ways to increase the competitiveness in Romanian apparel and fashion on the international market, focusing on originality, quality, online commerce, and marketing. The fourth part includes the methodology and presents two evolving technologies, strongly connected, namely cloud computing and big data, and two important applications for social network analysis: Gephi and NodeXL. Also, in this section, we propose a model for integrating big data with an existing enterprise resource planning system, thus leading to a four-layer architecture based on a cloud-based Hadoop implementation. Finally, the chapter highlights the influence of big data on decision-making throughout the fashion supply chain and the points of view of all the actors involved.

The focus area of this paper is twofold: covering the theoretical background about cloud-based Business Intelligence, and the practical approach using the Jaspersoft environment. Also, by choosing the main application area, we emphasized the advantage of using such instruments as an educational tool, with the goal of giving the students an opportunity to discover data collections and explore analysis methods. After an overview of the Business Intelligence and Cloud Computing main concepts, we have pointed out the benefits of using BI in the Software as a Service (SaaS) philosophy, and we used the facilities of Jaspersoft BI software to model frequently used analysis requirements on several virtual firms

Given the prolonged economic crisis felt by entire business world, companies have turned to knowledge, processing and analyzing information as powerful tools of top management. IT market has provided business intelligence software, useful for companies in their effort to obtain current situation viewed from different angles, and projections that underpin decision-making strategy. In this article we focused on two goals: the presentation of the concept and the environment to realize a financial forecasting for a company, and the experiment itself which refers to the use of an existing software (trial free software GMDH Shell) to perform a case study of OMV company. Based on the financial consolidate statements of the OMV PETROM SA Company during 2005-2011, we applied various forecasting models in order to obtain a forecasting of financial indicators for 2012. We also made an assessment of the accuracy of predictions, comparing partial data published by the company in the first two semesters and we analyzed the mismatch causes.

In the actual context of developing digital services, the promotion of a system that manages multiple e-commerce sites can be extremely valuable in increasing the economic effects for the companies. This paper presents the current stage of the experimental system design and implementation, an open system website-based (called Single Way for E-Commerce - SWEC) having the goal to collaborate with many database servers of the companies that offer e-commerce sevices and also to interract with electronic payment and e-administration systems. This new approach allows the clients, after them authentication, to navigate on e-commerce websites and search different products, grouping on domains, companies and geographic areas. SWEC System will offer to the customer the opportunity to visualize and compare similar products, to order and receive a single invoice for all the products he wants to buy.

In the contemporary period, more than ever, foreign investors seek to maximize the efficiency of their activities. In the race for the foreign direct investment attraction , Romania has many advantages that have propelled it on top in 2004-2008. Analysis of economic and financial performances of subsidiaries of transnational companies active in Romania, considered as representative for their fields of activity, allowed us to formulate judgments about the prospects of investment in the Romanian economy produced by firms with trans-borders business.

In the current situation of the economic crisis, when companies target budgetcuttings in a context of an explosive data growth, the IT community must evaluate potentialtechnology developments not only on their technical advantages, but on their economiceffects as well. More then ever, the old cliché “doing more things with fewer resources” istrue today. Many IT companies started building very large facilities, called data centers(DCs) or Internet DC (IDCs), which provide businesses a wide range of solutions forsystems deployment and operation. In recent years, the IT departments around the worldhave moved from data center and infrastructure consolidation to virtualization.Data center virtualization is the process of aligning available resources with the actualneeds of the offered services, moving from physical servers to virtual servers, sharing andprovisioning servers, networks, storage, and applications. By taking advantage of threebasic innovations — virtualization, tiered storage architectures and dynamic provisioningsoftware — an organization can achieve greater efficiencies in their current computingenvironment.Such a unified computing architecture offers end-to-end virtualization; all structures areoptimized for virtualized environments, from the CPU to the aggregation layer. Incombination with embedded management, this new approach increases responsiveness andreduces the opportunities for human error, improving consistency and reducing server andnetwork deployment times.

Clothing industry enjoys a high level of attention on all world markets, despite the prolonged economic crisis. Companies have turned to knowledge and research, processing and analyzing information obtained from the market analysis, surveys, their own and their competitor’s sales evolution, and are making use of short- and medium-term forecasts as powerful tools for the top management. The paper presents a twofold approach regarding forecasting of the financial indicators and trends related to the Romanian clothing industry, firstly at macroeconomic level, taking into account the interest of potential investors in this field, and secondly at microeconomic level, representing the analysis of the results for an operational company.

ARM®'s success to date has been largely due to its remarkable performance/power (MIPS/Watt) rating, and this will likely continue to be its most critical benchmark for future applications. This paper considers the way in which attention to interdependent detail in intelligent voltage management, cache controller design, conditionally executable instructions, and interrupt control hardware contribute to the ARM architecture's high performance and low power operation.

Trusted and precise time sources are required in computer networks and Internet for various reasons: time stamps for electronic documents, online transactions, storage and document retrieval, electronic mail, multimedia applications and many others. Also, the demand for Ethernet as a real-time control network is increasing, as manufacturers realize the benefits of employing a single network technology across the plant. For control and measurement applications, the need of an accurate distribution-wide sense of time is even more stringent than regular applications. This paper is comparing two clock synchronization protocols, the Network Time Protocol and the IEEE-1588 Precision Time Protocol. It gives an overview of synchronization methods by the time stamping employed in IP-based real-time applications looking at the possible sources of errors as well as the achievable performance of the two standards.

In the crisis frame, many forecasts failed to provide well determined ratios. What we tried to explain in this paper is how some selected Central and Eastern European countries will perform in the near future: Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic, using neural networks- based forecasting model which we created for the nominal and real convergence ratios. As a methodology, we propose the forecasting based on artificial neural network (ANN), using the well-known software tool GMDH Shell. For each output variable, we obtain a forecast model, according to previous values and other input related variables, and we applied the model to all countries. Our forecasts are much closer to the partial results of 2013 in the analyzed countries than the European Commission’s or other international organizations’ forecasts. The results of the forecast are important both for governments to design their financial strategies and for the investors in these selected countries. According to our results, the Czech Republic seems to be closer to achieve its nominal convergence in the next two years, but it faces great difficulties in the real convergence area, because it did not overpass the recession.