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Major public cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure or Google, offer seamless experiences for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). With the emergence of the public cloud's vast usage, administrators must be able to have a reliable method to provide the seamless experience that a public cloud offers on a smaller scale, such as a private cloud. When a smaller deployment or a private cloud is needed, OpenStack can meet the goals without increasing cost or sacrificing data control.

To demonstrate these enablement goals of resiliency and elasticity in IaaS and PaaS, the authors design a private distributed system cloud platform using OpenStack and its core services of Nova, Swift, Cinder, Neutron, Keystone, Horizon and Glance on a five-node deployment.

Through the demonstration of dynamically adding an IaaS node, pushing the deployment to its physical and logical limits, and eventually crashing the deployment, this paper shows how the PackStack utility facilitates the provisioning of an elastic and resilient OpenStack-based IaaS platform that can be used in production if the deployment is kept within designated boundaries.

The authors adopt the multinode-capable PackStack utility in favor of an all-in-one OpenStack build for a true demonstration of resiliency, elasticity and scalability in a small-scale IaaS. An all-in-one deployment is generally used for proof-of-concept deployments and is not easily scaled in production across multiple nodes. The authors demonstrate that combining PackStack with the multi-node design is suitable for smaller-scale production IaaS and PaaS deployments.

Omnichannel retailing emphasises the interplay between channels to provide seamless customer experiences across shopping journeys but is challenging for retailers to implement. This research explores the necessary actions and dynamic capabilities needed of retailers to create, extend and modify the organisational resource base required for realising omnichannel retailing.

A qualitative exploratory design with in-depth interviews of Generation Z customers and retail firms was used to provide insights into the dynamic capabilities necessary for obtaining omnichannel retailing.

This research elaborates on the dynamic capabilities needed for omnichannel solutions related to (1) the underlying technology (i.e. develop an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and online store), (2) customer experience optimisation (i.e. develop product delivery, return routines, supply chain management, curated exhibitions, showrooms and pop-up stores), (3) internal and external collaboration (i.e. collaborate across business units, strengthening the core leadership team and collaborate and align with service ecosystem partners and (4) overall omnichannel functionality (i.e. establish a customer-oriented retail culture, and integrate marketing communication and customisation through data exploration).

This research enriches the retailing literature on omnichannel solutions and responds to the need for theoretical anchoring by applying the dynamic capability perspective to address actions useful for realising omnichannel retailing.