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Developing the Story

The goal of telling a story is to introduce a new business model in an engaging, tangible way.
Keep the story simple and use only one protagonist. Depending on the audience, you can use
a different protagonist with a different perspective. Here are two possible starting points. consumer
market
online retail
STORYTELLING Company Perspective maintaining its own servers. Similarly, Amazon Elastic 1 it infrastruc- shop amazon.com
fulfi llment
Computing Cloud (Amazon EC2)(11) offers Amazon.
Ajit, 32, Senior IT Manager, Amazon.com
com’s own computing capability to outside clients.
Ajit has worked for Amazon.com as an IT
development &
manager for the past nine years. He and his Ajit knows that outsiders might view such services 2 ture & software
maintenance
176176 colleagues have pulled countless all-nighters as distracting Amazon.com from its core retail opera-
over the years to deliver the world-class IT tions. From the inside, though, the diversifi cation makes sales margins
DESIGN infrastructure that serves and maintains the perfect sense. 3 ture & software
it infrastruc-

company’s e-commerce business.
Ajit remembers that four years ago, his group spent
Ajit is proud of his work. Along with its fulfi llment much time coordinating the efforts of the network engi- 4 fulfi llment
excellence (1, 6), Amazon.com’s powerful IT infrastruc- neering groups, which managed IT infrastructure, and infrastructure
ture and software development capabilities (2,3) form the applications programming groups, which managed
the heart of its success at selling everything from books Amazon.com’s many Web sites. So they decided to build 5
to furniture online (7). Amazon.com (8) delivered over so-called application programming interfaces (APIs) technology & content
6
fulfi llment
half a billion page impressions to online shoppers (9) in (12) between these two layers, which would allow the (marketing)
2008, and spent over a billion dollars for technology and latter to easily build on the former. Ajit also remembers
amazon web
content (5), notably to run its e-commerce operations. exactly when they started to realize that this would be services: s3, ec2, companies and
sqs, other web developers
But now Ajit is even more excited, because Amazon. useful to external as well as internal customers. So under services
com is traveling far beyond its traditional retail offers. It’s Jeff Bezos’s leadership, Amazon.com decided to create a APIs
in the process of becoming one of the most important new business with the potential to generate a signifi cant
infrastructure providers in e-commerce. revenue source for the company. Amazon.com opened
With a service called Amazon Simple Storage up its infrastructure APIs to provide what it calls Amazon
Systems (Amazon S3) (11) the company is now using its Web Services to outside parties on a fee-for-service basis utility computing fees
own IT infrastructure to provide online storage to other (14). Since Amazon.com had to design, create, imple-
companies at rock-bottom prices. This means that an ment, and maintain this infrastructure anyway, offering
online video hosting service can store all customer vid- it to third parties was hardly a distraction.
eos on Amazon’s infrastructure rather than buying and

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