How consulting firms do the businesses? What is the lift cycle of an engagement? I’m thinking about these questions these days. As a technical consultant, I experienced several SAP engagements/projects but still couldn’t draw a overall picture of an engagement. Thus I read some material from the Internet and tried to summarized the consulting engagement lift cycle from my own understanding.
A typical engagement always begins with identifying a potential client, winning the engagement, performing the work, and ending with review the project. All of these steps comprise an Engagement Life Cycle. If you have met the client’s needs and expectations, the cycle begins again and relationships are strengthened through additional engagements. Please refer to below diagram for a better understanding of the whole lifecycle.
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The Industry Classification Benchmark (ICB) is a company classification system developed by Dow Jones and FTSE. It is used to segregate markets into sectors within the macroeconomy. The ICB uses a system of 10 industries, partitioned into 20 supersectors, which are further divided into 41 sectors, which then contain 114 subsectors.
The principal aim of the ICB is to categorize individual companies into subsectors based primarily on a company’s “source of revenue or where it constitutes the majority of revenue”. If a company is equally divided amongst several distinct subsections, authorities from the Dow Jones and FTSE may be summoned to make a final judgment. Firms may appeal their classification at any time.
The ICB is used globally (though not universally) to divide the market into increasingly specific categories, allowing investors to compare industry trends between well-defined subsectors. The ICB replaced the legacy FTSE and Dow Jones classification systems on 3 January 2006, and is used today by the NASDAQ, NYSE and several other markets around the globe. All ICB sectors are represented on the New York Stock Exchange except Equity Investment Instruments (8980) and Nonequity Investment Instruments (8990).
Note that the terms “industry” and “sector” are reversed from S&P’s GICS and the more common usage by professionals.
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In choosing new enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, implementation is every bit as important as finding the right program. You should be thinking about it proactively when evaluating systems, you should raise the topic with prospective vendors and even ask for examples of their customers’ strategies.
A ERP software adviser runs a survey trying to find out which ERP implementation strategy (big bang, phased rollout, or parallel adoption) has the best success rate.
Please help by completing the survey in the article at: http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/manufacturing/erp-implementation-strategies-1031101/. You can also find interesting information about some widely used ERP implementation strategies.
What is Reverse Proxy
A reverse proxy is a proxy server that is installed in a server network. Typically, reverse proxies are used in front of Web servers. All connections coming from the Internet addressed to one of the Web servers are routed through the proxy server, which may either deal with the request itself or pass the request wholly or partially to the main web servers.
A reverse proxy dispatches in-bound network traffic to a set of servers, presenting a single interface to the caller. For example, a reverse proxy could be used for load balancing a cluster of web servers. In contrast, a forward proxy acts as a proxy for out-bound traffic. For example, an ISP may use a proxy to forward HTTP traffic from its clients to external web servers on the Internet; it may also cache the results to improve performance.
Architecture of Reverse Proxy
Related Products
There are many web server can be used as reverse proxy. I just list some of them.
- Squid
- Apache
- Sun Java System Web Server