The following glossary defines 290 terms related to the IT Industry.  
Please do not reproduce without permission.

B2B

Business to Business also known as e-biz, is the exchange of products, services, or information between businesses rather than between businesses and consumers.

B2Bi

Business to Business Integration deals basically about performance in secure sharing information among businesses and their information systems. It promises to dramatically transform the way business is conducted between partners, suppliers and customers or buyers.

All companies (large, medium, small, or new) can experience increased growth and success through tightly integrated partnerships. Companies, from across a variety of industries, are embracing B2Bi and realizing the enormous competitive advantage it provides, through faster time to market, reduced cycle times, and increased customer service. Through integration of business and technical processes, companies are able to strengthen relationships with partners and customers, achieve seamless integration inside and outside the enterprise, gain real-time views of customer accounts, increase operational efficiencies, and reduce costs.

B Channel

Bearer Channel. It is a 64 Kbps communication channel in ISDN.

Backbone

Main high-speed network connection composing the Internet.  Backbones are operated by major telecommunications companies like Sprint, MCI, or AT&T.  Internet backbone maps are here.  

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred over the network in a fixed amount of time.  On the Net, it is usually expressed in bits per second (bps) or in higher units like Mbps (millions of bits per second).  28.8 modem can deliver 28,800 bps, a T1 line is about 1.5 Mbps.

Basic Rate Interface (BRI)

A BRI line is one of two access methods for ISDN (the other one is Primary Rate Interface - PRI).
A BRI has 64 Kbps B channels and one 16 Kbps D channel.

Baud

The rate at which bits are transmitted over a communication link. Baud is the number of transitions (that are used to encode bits) that take place in one second.

Binary

Data represented in binary format uses only two digits - 0 and 1.

Binary Mode

FTP client mode used to transfer binary files (multimedia files, executables and other data files). Not suitable for transferring normal text files.

BI

(Business Intelligence) is a broad category of computer software solutions that enables a company or organization to gain insight into its critical operations through reporting applications and analysis tools. BI applications may include a variety of components such as tabular reports, spreadsheets, charts, and dashboards.

Well-designed BI applications can give anyone in your company the ability to make better decisions by quickly understanding the various “information assets” in your organization and how these interact with each other. These assets can include customer databases, supply chain information, personnel data, manufacturing, and sales and marketing activity, as well as any other source of information critical to your operation. BI software allows you to integrate these disparate data sources into a single coherent framework for real-time reporting and detailed analysis by anyone in your extended enterprise – customers, partners, employees, managers, and executives.

Bit

(Binary DigIT) the smallest unit of information, comprising of either a 1 or 0.

Bit rate

The speed at which bits are transmitted over a communication link. Expressed in bits per second (bps).

Body

The part of an email message that contains the actual text of the message.

Bookmark

A way of storing a frequently visited website address. It is then easier to access the website in the future.

Bot

An automated piece of software that can be used in chat rooms or to crawl the web.

BRB

Be Right Back

Bridge

A network device used to connect two LANs using different cabling.

Broadcast

Sending a packet to all machines on the network.

Browser

Computer program that allows to search the World Wide Web and displays the content of the webpages. Examples are Mosaic, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera and Internet Explorer.

Browser sniffing

The process in which the web site tries to determine what kind of web browser the user is using. This is done to suit the website to the particular capabilities of the browser.

Brute-Force

A Brute-Force attack is a method of defeating a cryptographic scheme by systematically trying a large number of possibilities. For example, a large number of the possible keys in a key space in order to decrypt a message. In most schemes, the theoretical possibility of a brute force attack is recognized, but it is set up in such a way that it would be computationally infeasible to carry out. Accordingly, one definition of "breaking" a cryptographic scheme is to find a method faster than a brute force attack.

BTW

By The Way

Business Intelligence

See also BI