Research on business networks has traditionally focussed on understanding the nature of relationships in networks but seldom the outcomes from business networking activities. This thesis examines the benefits from business networking from the perspective of firms in the West Midlands and explains the factors which improve networking performance. Networking is hailed by academics and marketing practitioners as a way to improve business performance. Firms are encouraged to invest resources in networking activities, without necessarily being able to measure the result. Researchers following in the ‘markets as networks’ tradition have identified understanding the benefits from business networking activities as a subject for further investigation. Using survey data from 298 firms in the West Midlands, the findings show that strength of relationship, planned networking behaviour and networking intensity to be significant indicators of networking performance. Analysis also shows degree of embeddedness to have a mediating effect on networking performance. This study provides empirical support for the idea that firms which adopt a systematic approach to business networking achieve better outcomes in terms of networking performance when measured as a percentage of sales turnover, compared to firms adopting an ad-hoc approach to networking. This study contributes to the marketing and markets as networks literature as well as advancing the conceptualisation of networking performance measured in terms of sales turnover. The thesis offers insights from the focal firm’s perspective as to why business networking is important and identifies factors which contribute to positive networking outcomes and a measure of networking performance

Cloud computing is a fast-growing sector among software companies. Cloud platforms provide services such as spreading out storage and computational power over several geographic locations, on-demand resource allocation and flexible payment options. Virtualization is a technology used in conjunction with cloud technology and offers the possibility to share the physical resources of a host machine by hosting several virtual machines on the same physical machine. Each virtual machine runs its operating system which makes the virtual machines hardware independent. The cloud and virtualization layers add additional layers of software to the server environments to provide the services. The additional layers cause an overlay in latency which can be problematic for latency sensitive applications. The primary goal of this thesis is to investigate how the networking components impact the latency in an OpenStack cloud compared to a traditional deployment. The networking components were benchmarked under different load scenarios, and the results indicate that the additional latency added by the networking components is not too significant in the used network setup. Instead, a significant performance degradation could be seen on the applications running in the virtual machine which caused most of the added latency in the cloud environment. / Molntjänster är en snabbt växande sektor bland mjukvaruföretag. Molnplattformar tillhandahåller tjänster så som utspridning av lagring och beräkningskraft över olika geografiska områden, resursallokering på begäran och flexibla betalningsmetoder. Virtualisering är en teknik som används tillsammans med molnteknologi och erbjuder möjligheten att dela de fysiska resurserna hos en värddator mellan olika virtuella maskiner som kör på samma fysiska dator. Varje virtuell maskin kör sitt egna operativsystem vilket gör att de virtuella maskinerna blir hårdvaruoberoende. Moln och virtualiseringslagret lägger till ytterligare mjukvarulager till servermiljöer för att göra teknikerna möjliga. De extra mjukvarulagrerna orsakar ett pålägg på responstiden vilket kan vara ett problem för applikationer som kräver snabb responstid. Det primära målet i detta examensarbete är att undersöka hur de extra nätverkskomponenterna i molnplattformen OpenStack påverkar responstiden. Nätverkskomonenterna var utvärderade under olika belastningsscenarion och resultaten indikerar att den extra responstiden som orsakades av de extra nätverkskomponenterna inte har allt för stor betydelse på responstiden i den använda nätverksinstallationen. En signifikant perstandaförsämring sågs på applikationerna som körde på den virtuella maskinen vilket stod för den större delen av den ökade responstiden.