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E-commerce

9
consumer
market
online retail
shop 7 Customer Perspective infrastructure through a so-called application program-
fulfi llment amazon.com Randy, 41, Web Entrepreneur ming interface (API)(12) and store all the data and appli- STORYTELLING
it infrastruc- 8 Randy is a passionate Web entrepreneur. cations for his own services on Amazon.com’s servers.
ture & software
development & After 18 years in the software industry he is The same went for Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud
maintenance
now running his second startup, providing (Amazon EC2). Randy didn’t have to build and maintain 177
177
sales margins enterprise software through the Web. He his own infrastructure to crunch the numbers for his
10
spent 10 years of his career in large software enterprise application service. He could simply plug into
it infrastruc- companies and eight years in start-ups. Amazon and use its computing power in return for hourly DESIGN
ture & software
fulfi llment Throughout his career, one constant struggle has usage fees (14).
infrastructure been getting infrastructure investments right. To him, He immediately understood why the value was
running servers to provide services was basically a coming from the giant e-tailer rather than from IBM or
commodity business, but a tricky one due to the enor- Accenture. Amazon.com was providing and maintaining
technology & content mous costs involved. Tight management was crucial; IT infrastructure (2, 3, 5) to serve its online retail busi-
fulfi llment
(marketing) when you’re running a start-up you can’t invest millions ness (7) every day on a global scale. This was its core
in a server farm. competency. Taking the step to offer the same infrastruc-
amazon web
services: s3, ec2, companies and But when serving the enterprise market, you’d better ture services to other companies (9) was not much of a
sqs, other web developers
services have a robust IT infrastructure in place. That’s why Randy stretch. And since Amazon.com was in retail, a business
11 13
APIs was intrigued when a friend at Amazon.com told him with low margins (11), it had to be extremely cost-
12 about the new IT infrastructure services his company effi cient (5), which explained the rock-bottom prices of
was launching. That was the answer to one of Randy’s its new Web Services.
most important in-house jobs: running his services on a
utility computing fees world-class IT infrastructure, being able to scale quickly,
and all the while paying only for what his company was
14
actually using. That was exactly what Amazon’s Web
Infrastructure Services (11) promised. With Amazon Simple Storage
Systems (Amazon S3), Randy could plug into Amazon’s

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