Review By: Stan Thompson
09/11/2002This book uses a four-level reference model to help readers understand and analyze eBusiness scalability. The four levels consist of a business model, a functional model, a customer behavior model, and an IT resource model. The book uses these models to explain the impact of eBusiness technologies on performance, to forecast the workload of sites, and to capacity plan using the performance models. The book presents several eBusiness examples to clarify the concepts.

The book comprises fifteen chapters organized in five parts: Modeling for eBusiness; Evaluating eBusiness Infrastructure and Services; Capacity Planning for eBusiness; Models for Specific eBusiness Segments; and Summary, Challenges, and Perspectives.

- Part 1 discusses the four-level model used to analyze and design eBusiness sites, presents various levels of customer models, and describes how software servers interact to implement eBusiness functions.
- Part 2 describes the various elements of IT infrastructure needed to support eBusiness, presents a quantitative analysis of authentication services, and describes how credit card payments are made on the Web.
- Part 3 uses several examples to describe capacity planning methods for eBusiness.
- Part 4 presents examples of business-to-consumer and business-to-business to explain the quantitative methods the book presents.
- Part 5 summarizes the major points of the book and contains a glossary of important terms.

In the Preface, the authors state the book is intended for students, graduate students, and professionals in the industry. The book is organized so the concepts presented in the first parts of the book become the basis for detailed examples and explanations later in the book. For each concept, the book first explains the technology, then it covers performance implications. The text always moves from the general explanation to the specific scaling formula.

If you need an introduction to eBusiness scaling, this is probably not the book with which to start. It does an excellent job of explaining complex concepts in clear and easy to understand terms. Examples always connect concepts to eBusiness applications to help readers understand. However, the numerous formulas and explanations of how to compute and measure scaling are complex and can be difficult to follow. Therefore, if you need basic information, you need to skim over the detailed formula explanations.

If you are a student learning to measure scaling or a professional who needs a reference to determine scaling metrics for a particular application, this book can be very useful. As a student text, the book provides more than adequate coverage on all topics to create any type of case study you need. For the professional, the formulas always build in complexity, so you can quickly see what metrics you need from what source to measure scaling. If you know what you need to measure, this text can provide the information you need for your computation.

I believe this book is a valuable tool to add to any e-commerce and eBusiness toolkit.