THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGICAL
INNOVATION TO THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THE
SYSTEM FOR E-BUSINESS OF THE TOURISM
ORGANIZATIONS
Radoslav Miltchev and Melina Neykova
University of Forestry, Sofia, Bulgaria
Department of Computer Systems and Informatics
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
INTRODUCTION
The application of contemporary solutions to the field of
E-BUSINESS is among the basic preconditions for increasing the
competitiveness of organizations and business entities. They must
ensure the management of various processes where a key point is
to provide accessibility to the information resources and assets of
the organizations.
Bulgarian organizations operating in the tourism sector,
similar to those operating in the other sectors of the economy,
often face problems affecting the formation of their e-business
strategy and this is a result of the insufficient assessment of the
impact of technological innovations in the area of applied
Information аnd Communication Technologies (ICT).
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
Purpose
The main goal of the present study is related to:
• extending the lifecycle of the ICTs of the organization;
• balancing the workload of on-line systems in accordance
•
with their hardware features;
increasing the level of information security and protection
of existing IT assets and resources of the business entities.
Methodology
 For the purposes of the study has been developed a testing
environment in accordance with the used standard physical
assets that are available to organizations.
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
Findings
 The research considers the possibilities of creating an
approach for the migration of technological innovations to small
and medium-sized enterprises operating in the tourism sector,
which affect the sustainability of their e-business system and the
formation of their successful business strategy.
Contribution
 The
expansion and the provision of a secure and reliable
access to the online e-business resources of the tourism
organizations;
 At the same time the study is part of intelligent practices in
information technology which help reduce the harmful impacts
on the environment as a key aspect of applying the basic
principles of sustainable development to which we aspire today.
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
A TREND IN THE AVAILABILITY OF E-BUSINESS WEBSITES
The analysis of statistical data on the e-business resources used by the
organizations in the Republic of Bulgaria, including those in the tourism sector,
indicates that at present the existing tendency is towards the massive use of
WEBSITES.
According to the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute (NSI)
Аbout half of the small enterprises in Bulgaria
And 60 % of medium-sized enterprises in the country have WEBSITES.
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
A TREND IN THE USE OF E-BUSINESS RESOURCES AND SERVICES
According to the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute (NSI)
Оver the past decade the percentage of organizations on the
territory of the Republic of Bulgaria that use e-commerce has
increased.
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
A TREND IN THE USE OF E-BUSINESS RESOURCES AND SERVICES
The WEBSITES are particularly important for tourism companies.
And today every manager knows that the correct positioning of the ebusiness resources allows them to build a reputation on the Internet and
provides immediate opportunities to increase the number of potential
customers, partners and contractors.
The obligatory information systems that should be supported are
websites containing elements, such as:
 electronic catalogues of the services provided;
online booking tools;
electronic payment tools;
feedback forms, etc.
For this purpose, the organizations will necessarily have to ensure
the maintenance of these systems through WEB-SERVERS.
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
RESEARCH PROBLEM
A large part of the companies operating in the tourism sector and in
other sectors of the economy are small and medium-sized enterprises. In
Bulgaria the percentage of micro, small and medium enterprises is 99.8%
(SBA, 2014).
It is difficult for such organisations to rely on an ICT development
and deployment department within the organization most often due to the
shortage of staff, possessing the appropriate competencies and eventually
they experience difficulties taking advantage of innovative solutions in this
area.
Depending on the organization policy the main systems that are
used for e-business (website content management systems, customer
relationship management systems, enterprise resource planning systems, etc.)
at this stage usually exist in the form of a resource which operates on one
single physical machine.
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
RESEARCH PROBLEM
This machine becomes the single potential point where damage
can occur, including overload due to increased consumer seasonal
activity or physical damage to the hardware equipment, and whose
failure may result in a complete denial of service.
Ultimately this is directly related to the
potential possibility of losses and missed business benefits
as well as in the possibility of diminished goodwill in the
eyes of customers, contractors and partners to the tourism
organizations .
This places at the forefront the need to ensure the resources
and services in continuous mode 24/7 (twenty-four hours a day, seven
days a week).
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
RESEARCH SOLUTION
 Balancing the workload of online resources, for example as a result
of the seasonal nature of some services when increased the number
of user requests for access to the online services. Thus the
requirements in the tourism industry can be successfully met.

Increasing the productivity of existing servers from the lower class,
so that they can be commensurate with servers from the higher class.
 The environmentally-oriented
intelligent practices in information technology.
It is directly related to reducing the amount
of waste electrical and electronic equipment as it is currently one of the
fastest growing waste streams in the EU and is a priority under the
WEEE Directive (Waste electrical and electronic equipment, Eurostat, 2013).
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
RESEARCH SOLUTION
 In order to reduce ICT costs, this approach allows to use both:
• existing computer equipment in the office, which is generally used
by the employees as part of their daily work and at present it can go
into full operation;
•
or reuse of computer equipment,
which is no longer actively used,
because they are being replaced with new ones,
but it is not yet completely rejectable.
Requires minimum investments in software - it uses widely available
open source solutions - FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
OVERVIEW OF THE STUDIED SCHEME
The scheme shows the
studied e-business scenario
and includes the most
complicated possible option
of implementing
a Three-Tier Architecture for
access to the information
system.
The business part of the Three-tier Architecture of the e-business
platform is installed on the group of developed cluster nodes (Node 1, Node 2,
..., Node N). For this purpose a content management system was installed on
the nodes- Joomla version 3.3 (Joomla, 2015).
The database which is used by the content management system is
installed and configured on a separate server.
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
OVERVIEW OF THE STUDIED SCHEME
For the proposed approach was installed and configured a server
for balancing online service user requests. It works in two different test
modes:
• balancing (suitable in cases where the nodes of the cluster used
have similar hardware features);
• unequal load balancing (suitable in cases where the cluster is
constructed using heterogeneous computer systems with different
hardware parameters).
The proposed solution was tested in a real working
environment in which were conducted series of experiments, which
have been organised into two main groups:
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
USED APPROACHES TO THE RESEARCH SOLUTION
FIRST GROUP
The nodes forming the cluster were created using the dual boot
computer systems in which UBUNTU Server 14.04 LTS was uploaded as a
second operating system, which operates on a 30 GB partition. The operating
system does not have a graphical interface in order to limit the consumption of
a useful resource, and it operates on a machine with a dual core processor and
2 GB RAM. This approach allows the tourist company to use both outdated
computer systems that not yet completely rejectable and newer systems.
SECOND STUDIED GROUP
The nodes forming a cluster are uploaded on virtual machines, working
on real machines that are used by employees in the tourism organization to
perform their daily work, without limiting their access to the systems. It is
appropriate when the organization has more contemporary
technical
equipment. In the present case, the machines are with four-core processors and
4 GB RAM.
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
PHYSICAL TOPOLOGY OF THE TEST ENVIRONMENT
 The studied cluster
was formed by
three nodes that
communicated with
the balancing server
and the database
server.
 In the present case
the requests from
Physical Topology of the test environment.
external users are
directed towards
a balancing server which manages traffic and redirects it to the nodes of the
internal network that form the cluster.

The nodes send back a response which gives access to the resources of
the tourist company - home page, page for making on-line reservations, ecatalog, etc.
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
TESTING THE PROPOSED SOLUTION
The productivity of the environment was tested using the Apache
Benchmark tool (AB, 2015). For the purposes of the study, a sequence
of 10,000 requests made by 1,000 competitive users simultaneously
was generated. This is significantly higher than the number of
requests made to travel sites of Bulgarian organizations in the sector,
especially of small and medium businesses.
The load to the nodes was examined using standard command line
tools. The system resources were tested with the tool htop (Htop,
2015), and the load on the network controller of the individual nodes
was tested using the bmon (Bmon, 2015).
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
Balanced Load
Unbalanced Load
When using one system in the unbalanced mode, in order to process 350 KiB
(RX) of received requests within 20 seconds, the machine returned content in the amount
of 1055 KiB (TX). On the other hand, when using the balanced load method for the same
period of time, these values are reduced more than threefold in relation to the number
of nodes which are used for balancing the load.
Ultimately, the results indicate that the reduction of the load of the individual
nodes is proportional to the number of the nodes that are used for equal load balancing.
ToSEE - Tourism in South East Europe
3rd International Scientific Conference
Sustainable Tourism, Economic Development and Quality of Life
University of Rijeka, Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management Opatija
RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
The presented solution, as part of the strategy for e-business
development, ensures reliable and continuous access to online e-business
resources (24/7) and provides opportunities for SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS
EXPANSION and for significantly improving the competitiveness of small and
medium-sized enterprises in the tourism sector.
In view of the economic crisis in recent years, which has affected all
sectors of the economy, the present research is focused on reducing costs
and investments in new computer technologies by stimulating the reuse of
computer resources in organizations.
In addition, the presented solution is а step towards sustainable
use of computer equipment by organizations. It contributes to improving
environmental and economic indicators as an essential part of the
implementation of the basic principles of sustainable development to which
we must strive today.
Thank you for your attention!
UNIVERSITY OF FORESTRY, Sofia, Bulgaria
Faculty of Business Management,
Department of Computer Systems and Informatics,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This document was supported by the grant No BG051PO001-3.3.06-0056, financed
by the Human Resources Development Operational Programme (2007 – 2013) and
co-financed jointly by the European Social Fund of the European Union and the
Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science.
Melina Neykova, M. Eng, PhD student
E-mail: melina.neykova@gmail.com
Radoslav Miltchev, Ph.D., Assoc.Professor
E-mail: rmiltchev@gmail.com