An Architecture for Cloud-based Consumer Support Software-as-a-Service
Jenperng Yu · The Smart Computing Review · 2014
For enterprises, customer relationships have been commonly recognized as a critical factor in success. Effective customer relationships could help enterprises deliver services to customers based on their needs, preferences, or past transactions. This model, however, emphasizes the use of customer information to benefit enterprises. Customers, in contrast, receive less information from enterprises. To address this issue, the paradigm Consumer Support Systems is proposed to support effective information provision for customers to aid their decision making. In addition, Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service has become popular for its rich set of features and practical applications for business. Thus Consumer Support Systems can begin to employ Software-as-a-Service as the service provisioning model to further enhance their effectiveness with customer relationships. We therefore present an outline for such a Consumer Support Software-as-a-Service system. The architecture is identified from the consideration of Consumer Support Systems and Software-as-a-Service characteristics, through the recognition of architectural components that support the employment of Software-as-a-Service into Consumer Support Systems, and finally ends with a collaborative specification among architectural components to realize the employment. In particular, with Software-as-a-Service features, prospective clouds and their intrinsic configuration elements are identified for deploying architectural components into these elements to facilitate the realization of Consumer Support Software-as-a-Service. The architecture is illustrated by a Consumer Support Software-as-a-Service system for travel arrangements.