Amazon Evolution

Amazon Evolution

XBIS/219 Business Information Systems

August 25, 2013

Amazon Evolution

In today’s modern world of business, consumers are constantly flocking toward online shopping for better bargains and convenience. Amazon has built itself into one of the largest retail sites on the global market. From their beginnings in 1994 of a website for purchasing books, they have grown to having annual sales of over $10 billion annually. Yet, Amazon is seeing their profit margins dwindle because of competition from other leading online names such as Google, Yahoo, and others and investors are not seeing the numbers they once had hoped for.

Because of this increasing online competition, Amazon company leaders developed a plan that included over hauling their business model from one of retail to include business services as well. Since Amazon uses a small percent of its resources at any given time, they have decided to offer online storing of documents and other computing services to other businesses which in turn will, assist them in running the technical and logistical ends of their business at a small fraction of the cost of upgrading or replacing their own systems. Adding these services to their own operations will allow Amazon to become a leader in the next wave of internet business opportunities (Rainer, 2009).

Amazon is not moving away from its core model of offering multiple products and timely deliveries, but only utilizing or diversifying its resources it has in place. Amazon’s vast information system is or was running at ten percent capacity. By adding more services for others to benefit from, Amazon will be able to compete with others to build a web-based global computing marketplace.

Three of the services that Amazon can provide are, Simple Storage Service (S3), The Elastic Cloud (EC2), and the Mechanical Turk (Rainer, 2009). Simple Storage Service gives users access to inexpensive, fast, and secure places in which to keep information relating to their business simply by accessing Amazon’s service  (Simple Storage Service, 2013). Elastic Compute Cloud is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), 2013). Mechanical Turk is a service that gives users access to diverse, on demand workforce services which enables to them to build human intelligence into their programs (Amazon Mechanical Turk , 2013).

Amazon’s Web Service Elastic Beanstalk, is a service that allows customers to manage their web applications under the Amazon cloud. Customers simply upload their applications and the Elastic Beanstalk software automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring (AWS Elastic Beanstalk , 2013). With this service, customers can easily retain total control over their resources and can access them at any time, thus reducing cost of maintenance for their own systems.