In the current financial crisis and being challenged by growing needs, universities are facing problems in providing necessary information technology (IT) support for educational, research and development activities. The objective of this paper is to find alternatives to the use of IT, while leading universities to improve agility and obtain savings. The research methodology consisted in a rigorous analysis of the latest research on Cloud Computing as an alternative to IT provision, management and security. It also took into account the best practices for Cloud Computing usage within universities, plus the authors' experience in IT and higher education. The article begins with a brief introduction to Cloud Computing in universities, referring to the most important results obtained so far. Further, a starting point for universities to use Cloud Computing is provided, by proposing an adoption strategy. The strategy includes five stages, with emphasis on the evaluation of data and processes/functions/applications from several major universities based on some key criteria, while creating a correspondence between these aspects and the models/services/applications that exist on the Cloud market. The results obtained are encouraging and support the use of Cloud solutions in universities by improving knowledge in this field and providing a practical guide adaptable to the university's structure. In order to be applicable in practice, the proposed model takes into account the university's architecture and criteria such as mission, availability and importance of applications and also the data's mission, sensitivity, confidentiality, integrity and availability.

The progress of ICT technologies, day-ahead forecast, home energy management systems, implementation of smart meters, and Distributed Energy Sources (DER) enables new business opportunities for prosumers to locally trade the surplus via blockchain platforms leading to considerable advantages at the community level. The current research handles settlement similar to a centralized market that it is not necessarily the best solution for blockchain. Nonetheless, the settlement is essential as sellers and buyers perceive the attractiveness of the local trading through the market results. In this paper, we propose two novel and efficient settlement mechanisms (Global Balancing Settlement GBS and Splitting Settlement SS) for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) electricity exchange enhancing the performance of the classic Pairwise Settlement PS. These will be written as stored procedures embedded into the smart contracts along with auctioning procedures. The simulations are performed using a small residential community with 30% of the electricity that can be locally traded to lower the bills and unstress the public grid. The performance of the two proposed settlement methods is proved by the 14 scenarios that thoroughly indicate that GBS and SS provide better results for both sellers and buyers than PS. In the reference scenario, with GBS, sellers have the highest encashments with almost 4% more, whereas buyers encounter the lowest payments with almost 5% less than in case of the classic settlement. Starting from reference scenario, alternative scenarios are envisioned to extend the analyses and assess the performance of the settlement mechanisms. The highest gain is recorded with GBS mechanism: almost 8.8% for sellers and 6.5% for buyers. Another interesting outcome is that GBS is providing better results than SS. When deviations are small, SS provides almost 6% gain for both sellers and buyers, but when they increase, the gain is exceedingly small or none.

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In the context of modern society, based on knowledge and collaboration relationships, organizations are confronted with numerous challenges and difficulties. As a response to these challenges, the organizations must perform changes in order to be service oriented. At the same time, the instruments and modeling methodologies, as well as the management solutions, must be adapted to the new context. The paper justifies the organizations' need for service orientation, it exposes the main tendencies and problems related to the modeling of service-oriented organizations, and it offers an approach to the development of Business Intelligence agile solutions for the management of service-oriented organizations. INTRODUCTIONIn the context of the new economy, the governmental organizations and other public or private companies are confronted with numerous challenges and difficulties [5; 13; 10]. At the same time, the actual economic crisis leads to pressures upon the prices decrease and upon the continuous quality improvement. As a response to these challenges, the organizations must perform cultural, strategic and operational changes in order to be service oriented and in order to optimize the efficiency and effectiveness of all internal operations and of all interactions with the main stakeholders. Service orientation may be applied to individuals (including roles, capabilities and characteristics), to organizations (in terms of strategy, structure, culture and processes), but also to technology (according to the semantics, applications, architecture and infrastructure of modern organizations).Among the main changes that must be performed by organizations within the passing towards the service-oriented environment, the following must be mentioned: the transformation of traditional connected business processes to disconnected services and the vertical alignment with the services of information technology, which are offered by the virtual resources [3], the capture of market changes and the finding of answering solutions [7], the reallocation of dynamic resources according to the change of priorities and requests [9] and the business modeling so that it can stand efficient collaboration relationships between organizations [11].Management and service-oriented technology drew the attention of researchers and systems developers within the past years when it comes to finding certain methods of organizations agility development that can offer flexible business processes meant to increase the value of services offered to customers. Service oriented approaches are used for application development and for the software offered as a service, and they originate from software and e-business development communities. Service orientation occurs due to the existence of multiple organizational levels and to the growing need of integration, flexibility and agility.

Software systems for business management appeared as a result of the growing need to ensure a consistent IT support for most of the business activities that organizations have to deal with. Moreover, organizations continue to struggle for obtaining competitive advantages on the business market and to lower the cost of developing and maintaining computer systems to support their operations. As business rules play an important role within any organization, they should be taken into consideration as distinct elements when developing a software system that will operate in a collaborative environment. The paper addresses the problem of business rules modeling, with special emphasis on incorporating business rules in Unified Modeling Language (UML) models.