Marketplace Glossary
B
B2B - Business-to-Business
B/Ds - Broker Dealers
BGP - Border Gateway Protocol – A protocol for exchanging routing information between gateway hosts (each with its own router) in a network of autonomous systems. BGP is often the protocol used between gateway hosts on the Internet. The routing table contains a list of known routers, the addresses they can reach, and a cost metric associated with the path to each router to choose the best available route.
BPO - Business Process Outsourcing
C
CCC - Content, Communication, and Collaboration
CLEC - Competitive Local Exchange Carrier – A telephone company that competes with the already established local telephone business by providing its own network and switching. The term distinguishes new or potential competitors from established local exchange carriers (LECs). This arises from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which promoted competition among both long-distance and local phone service providers.
CO - Central Office – In telephone communication in the United States, a central office is an office in a locality that connects subscriber home and business lines on a local loop. The central office has switching equipment that can switch calls locally or to long-distance carrier phone offices. Other countries use the term public exchange.
CPE - Customer Premises Equipment – A telephone or other service provider's equipment located at the customer's physical location rather than on the provider's premises or somewhere in between. Telephone handsets, cable TV set-top boxes, and Digital Subscriber Line routers are examples. Historically, this term referred to equipment placed at the customer's end of the telephone line and usually owned by the telephone company. Today, almost any end-user equipment can be called customer premise equipment, and it can be owned by the customer or by the provider.
CRM - Customer Relationship Management
CSU/DSU - Channel Service Unit/Data Service Unit – A hardware device about the size of an external modem that converts a digital data frame from the communications technology used on a local area network (LAN) into a frame appropriate to a wide-area network (WAN) and vice versa.
Example: You might have a Web business from your home and have leased a digital line (perhaps a T-1 or fractional T-1 line) to a phone company or a gateway at an Internet service provider. You have a CSU/DSU at your end, and the phone company or gateway host has a CSU/DSU at its end.
D
DCC - Digital Content Creation
DDOS - Distributed Denial-of-Service – When many compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing a denial of service for users of the targeted system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, denying service to the system to legitimate users.
DNS - Domain Name System – The way the system locates Internet domain names and translates them into Internet Protocol addresses. A domain name is a meaningful and easy-to-remember "handle" for an Internet address.
DSL - Digital Subscriber Loop – A family of digital telecommunications protocols designed to allow high-speed data communication over the existing copper telephone lines between end-users and telephone companies. When the telephone system (PSTN) connects two conventional modems, it treats the communication the same as voice conversations. This has the advantage that there is no investment required from the telephone company (telco). Still, the disadvantage is that the bandwidth available for the communication is the same as that available for voice conversations, usually 64 kb/s (DS0) at most. The twisted-pair copper cables into individual homes or offices can usually carry significantly more than 64 kb/s, but the telco needs to handle the signal as digital rather than analog.
E
ECM - Enterprise Content Management
ECN/ATS/MTF - Electronic Communication Network, Alternative Trading System, Multilateral Trading Facility
EMS/OMS - Execution Management System, Order Management System
ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning
F
FE - Fast Ethernet – a local area network (LAN) transmission standard that provides a data rate of 100 megabits per second, referred to as 100BASE-T. It is possible to connect workstations with existing 10 megabits per second (10BASE-T) Ethernet cards to a Fast Ethernet network. The 100 megabits per second is a shared data rate, and the 10 Mbps card constrains input to each workstation.
G
GE - Gigabit Ethernet, a transmission technology based on the Ethernet frame format and protocol used in local area networks (LANs), provides a data rate of 1 billion bits per second (one gigabit). The backbone in many enterprise networks uses Gigabit Ethernet. The IEEE 802.3 standard defines Gigabit Ethernet, carried primarily on optical fiber (with very short distances possible on copper media). Existing Ethernet LANs with 10 and 100 Mbps cards can feed into a Gigabit Ethernet backbone.
I
IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service
IEEE 802.3 - The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) maintains the 802.3 standard specifications for Ethernet, a physical communication in a local area network (LAN). In general, 802.3 specifies the physical media and the working characteristics of Ethernet.
ILEC - Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier – A telephone company in the U.S. provided local service when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 occurred. ILECs include the former Bell operating companies (BOCs). These companies make up holding companies known collectively as the regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs). When a 1983 consent decree broke up the Bell System, RBOCs came into existence. ILECs are in contradistinction to CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers).
IOIs - Indications of Interest
ITO - Information Technology Outsourcing
L
LAN - Local Area Network – A group of computers and associated devices that share a common communications line or wireless link. Typically, connected devices share the resources of a single processor or server within a small geographic area (for example, within an office building). Usually, the server has applications and data storage that are shared in common by multiple computer users. A local area network can serve as few as two or three users (for example, in a home network) or as many as thousands of users (for example, in an FDDI network).
M
MPLS - Multiprotocol Label Switching – A standards-approved technology for speeding up network traffic and making it easier to manage. MPLS involves setting up a specific path for a given sequence of packets, identified by a label put in each packet, thus saving the time needed for a router to look up the address to the next node to forward the packet.
MSP - Managed Service Providers
N
NAP - Network Access Point – One of several major Internet interconnection points that tie all the Internet access providers together. For example, an AT&T user in Portland, Oregon, can reach the Web site of a Bell South customer in Miami, Florida. Originally, four NAPs (in New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco) were created and supported by the National Science Foundation as part of the transition from the original U.S. government-financed Internet to a commercially operated Internet. Since that time, several new NAPs have arrived, including WorldCom's "MAE West" site in San Jose, California, and ICS Network Systems' "Big East."
P
PaaS - Platform as a Service
Q
QOS - Quality of Service – The idea that transmission rates, error rates, and other characteristics can be measured, improved, and, to some extent, guaranteed in advance. QoS is of particular concern for the continuous transmission of high-bandwidth video and multimedia information. Dependably transmitting this kind of content is difficult in public networks using standard best-effort protocols.
S
SaaS - Software as a Service
SCM - Supply Chain Management
SDH - Synchronous Digital Hierarchy – A standard technology for synchronous data transmission on optical media. It is the international equivalent of Synchronous Optical Network. Both technologies provide faster and less expensive network interconnection than traditional PDH (Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy) equipment.
SI - Systems Integrators
SONET - The American National Standards Institute standard for synchronous data transmission on optical media. The international equivalent of SONET is synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH). Together, they ensure standards so that digital networks can interconnect internationally and that existing conventional transmission systems can take advantage of optical media through tributary attachments.
T
TCA - Transaction Cost Analysis
Trusted Provider - A Marketplace user that you have identified as a trusted organization. When searching for providers, Marketplace users can filter the results to include trusted providers only.
V
VAR - Value-Added Reseller
VDPC - Virtual Private Data Center
VLAN - Virtual Local Area Network – A local area network with a definition that maps workstations on some other basis than geographic location. For example, by department, type of user, or primary application. The virtual LAN controller can change or add workstations and manage load-balancing and bandwidth allocation more easily than with a physical picture of the LAN. Network management software keeps track of relating the virtual picture of the local area network with the actual physical picture.