...com Case Report Part 1 Case Overview This case is mainly about that Amazon.com provides Amazon Web Services (AWS) using its tremendous computing capacity. And utility computing is used as a method charging for services. Amazon’s powerful infrastructure provides them many advantages to attract service users. Such as S3, a data storage service, that is designed to make Web-scale computing easier and more affordable for developers. However, Amazon.com also has some problems in its development of AWS. We just study Amazon’s experience and find some solutions to those problems. Part 2 Organization Context Amazon.com is a virtual superstore with product offering in 36 categories. In 1995, Amazon.com was found. At the beginning, Amazon.com only provided services as bookstore through the Internet. Since 1995, Amazon.com has developed as the largest bookstore through Internet in the world. And Amazon.com is also the bookstore which sells the largest number of books all over the world. But Amazon.com has neither so many employees nor lots of buildings. Now, Amazon.com offers not only books but also music, video, furniture, clothing and even jewelry. 36 categories products are provided by Amazon.com now. Amazon.com reaches its diverse goals through acquiring other kinds of companies. And E-commerce helps Amazon reduce cost and become larger and larger. Since Amazon.com’s infrastructure is so powerful that most of its capacity is still not...
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...The New Frontier: Data Analytics CIS 500: Information Systems For Decision-Making Anywhere we travel on the internet we have been bombarded with seemingly codependent requests to, “Like US!”, “Follow US!”, “Watch US!”, “Share US!” from businesses of all types. If you think about it, this is exactly the dynamic. Businesses are in a dependent relationship, relying on the consumers for their survival. If a business wants to engage and remain in a viable relationship, it has to have a product/service the consumer desires and be able to deliver it in a manner that the consumer perceives as valuable. Even if a business has the “next greatest thing”, the consumer will not engage/continue in the relationship if the business does not or cannot provide it in a valuable way to the consumer. Amazon is one company that has been able to successfully develop this dynamic relationship. So then how does a business become and remain successful in the relationship? They need a better understanding of what the consumer wants by improving their Business Intelligence (BI). For decades, businesses have used statistics to analyze data to obtain information and insights for improving BI. With the advent of the computer, data analysis moved from statistical based inferences about the data to a more scientific method based on empirical results. This was the foundational begins of Data Analytics. Data Analytics, as defined in our course text is, specialized software, capabilities, and...
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...Introduction This report conducts External Analysis for Amazon, which includes macro and micro factors, Strategic Analysis, consisting of Porter's 5-force model, SWOT analysis and Marketing Mix, which conclude 7Ps, in order to assist Amazon in extending into a new online service, a social platform named `Amazon Book Club`. Part A: External Analysis 1. The Macro environment 1.1 Economic In recent years after economics crisis, global economy has been gradually improved. GDP, as a measure of a countries’ economy, has been increased in a stable pace in America [1]. At the same time, according to the data from People’s Daily Online, China’s household disposable income reached 20167 yuan in 2014, 8.0 percent increase compared with 2013 [2]. Take China as an example, ‘shopping online’ becomes the hot words in recent years. As it indicates in the chart [3], the scale of the E-commerce market extends gradually. All these figures indicate that people are more capable to purchase and attach more importance to the quality of life. Amazon, in the last 18 months, undoubtedly benefited from this tendency. For example, in the first Chinese ‘shopping overseas festival’ beginning on 28th, November in 2014, the sale increased by 24 times compared with the week before it [4]. 1.2 Political a. Governments’ policies will influence market structure and behavior. For example...
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...Title: Emergent Topics – Cloud Computing I work for a medium size corporation and they need to integrate an abundance of data, but the current infrastructure is not enough for the BI functionality that is required. Purchasing backend hardware for data storage is becoming a thing of the past. In house costs of support, hardware purchase and maintenance, and facilities management can be extremely expensive. Modern technology has spawned cost effective alternatives that can challenge in-house infrastructure performance and cost. Our recent network, bandwidth upgrade has increased our options for effective data storage and BI solutions. Cloud computing technology has come leaps and bounds from its inception. Cloud computing is basically the use of remote servers over a network, typically, the internet for data storage and retrieval. The servers are located in a data center managed by IT professionals and monitored all day, every day. Customers lease the infrastructure on a usage basis and are typically supported by a service level agreement . An intriguing new, cloud based, data warehouse service has just been released by Amazon which is fast, fully managed and offers petabyte-scale storage. The product named Amazon Redshift is also fully supportive of all our existing business intelligence tools including Jaspersoft, Microstrategy, Pentaho, Tableau, Business Objects and Cognos. There are no new languages to learn. You just load your cluster, connect your favorite...
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...1. What is the business of Zappos and what are its critical success factors (CSF’s)? [lists] Business of Zappos: Zappos is an online shoe store, providing customers with a great number of sizes, styles and brands. What Zappos applies is the Loyalty business model, which reflected in two ways. a. The loyalty of Zappos employees: the firm proposed “the offer” as a bonus to employees if they quit, which is an incentive for employees to quit. However, the employees that stay will be very committed to Zappos. b. The loyalty of Zappos’ customers: the services that Zappos offers to its customers are very attractive and beneficial to customers. For example, free delivers, 4-day delivery window and a 365-day return guarantee. All these services help Zappos gain more loyal customers. Their revenues are mostly come from its repeat customers. Critical Success: a. Timeliness of shipment: because as the business of Zappos grew, Zappos was confronted with the issues that their customers’ orders can’t be shipped on time. So Zappos opened its own warehouse and fulfillment centers, and of course hiring more employees to satisfy this high demand. Therefore, by implementing this set of actions, Zappos can offer the best selection of shoes available everywhere online. b. Training of employees: new employees must complete an intensive four-week training program, which let them better understand the company’s culture, business strategy and process. By training them, employees...
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...the world that hasn’t purchased at least one item from them or visited their websites at least once . In the following paragraphs we endeavor to analyze how these two companies have achieved this worldwide success and how they are defined by all as online giants and colossus. But above all, we will focus on how they differ from each other, what are their strengths and weaknesses, what their business model is and how it has changed over the course of time. We will discuss briefly the history of these two giants and explain how they deal and cope with this ever-changing market and business environment. We will start with the background of these two companies, and then analyze the differences in terms of business models, focusing on financial data, services provided, overall stakeholder value and customers’ perception. Background of eBay EBay was launched by Pierre Omidyar in 1995, and referring to his own words, his purpose was giving “ the power of the market back to individuals, not just large corporations”...and his goal was “pioneer new communities around the world built on commerce, sustained by trust and inspired by opportunities”. It is important for us to underline the words of Omidyar because they are the base of eBay’s success. Building up upon those initial foundations, eBay later on expanded in 39 countries, and developed partnerships and did investments in additional 15 markets. The main purpose of eBay was to connect sellers and buyers via an online market platform...
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...experiential marketing, social media & branding agency that leverages human connection to impact consumers and influencers in smart, meaningful ways. We accomplish this through Event Marketing, Event Production; Digital; Activations; Public Relations, Data Capture and of course, Experiential that focuses on directly engaging consumers and invites and encourages consumers to participate in the evolution of your brand. The brand and the "brand experience" are directly taken to consumers through interactive channels of retail, digital and live events. The Niche Factory is currently considering a new CRM system. The cloud is driving faster release & upgrade cycles overall. Customers use cloud applications in their everyday lives and those consumer applications typically have rapid response to feedback. The nature of cloud allows companies to be much more responsive giving you the flexibility to push out updates when you need to. (Columbus, 2013) There are a many cloud service companies to consider – you have to make a choice between an established, proven vendor or taking a chance as an early adopter of something new. (Columbus, 2013) In this case, we will look at three established, proven vendors: Google Compute Engine (GCE), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure. IaaS Considerations Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a cloud model which allows organizations to outsource computing equipment and resources such as servers, storage, networking as well as services...
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...1. Problem Statement Since Amazon was established in 1994 it has focused on growth – “get big fast”. This focus on growth of number of clients was based on the assumption that to establish Amazon as the biggest internet retailer in the world secured long term profitability instead of short term profitability. The growth had been carried out through expansion in markets and an aggressive acquisition strategy. In 2000 the investors started to change focus and while they had been willing to support the expansion for market share they now started to focus on profitability. Amazon therefore needed to change strategy and adapt to the need for running a profitable business with the new watchwords “march towards profitability”. But the question is whether Amazon can change the company around and become profitable and how they can achieve it. Some of the questions which need to be answered is: • What should Amazon do next? • Should it continue its international expansion, or perhaps retrench to allow for more profitable operations? • Should it add product categories or cut back to its Books, Music and Video core? • Could Amazon use its brand strength and sophisticated personalization algorithms to individually price its way into the black? • Could Amazon steal a page from Wal-Mart and focus on supply chain management to part the sea of red ink? • Alternatively, should Amazon return to its virtual roots and outsource...
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...As Amazon, Taobao is the biggest competitor in China. It has 70% market share in China. Of course, Amazon is a very successful online business but in China it is not. Quick search—Amazon Using a fast 64 500M memory Alpha servers and excellent Internet links. Amazon's site functionality is very convenient and fast. A general product description pages about 38K, can be used in an ordinary Modem Download within 13 seconds. Customers such as the Internet provides a great convenience. In addition to searching for options, customers can also browse 23 different topics, saving time online, increasing search speed. Although there is no tradition of the online bookstore presence, but the opportunities are much easier to shop around. Taobao has the largest Hadoop Distributed computing clusters, one day add data 50TB, there 40PB mass data storage. Distributed throughout the country more than 80 nodes CDN network to support traffic over 800Gbps. Taobao search engine capable of billions of product data in real-time search, in addition to their own research and development of storage systems and file caching system, and Java middleware and messaging middleware system, which all form a huge e-commerce operating system. October 2003, Taobao on the line above a feature called "secure transactions", the seller choose to support this functionality, the buyer would give the money to Taobao, etc. After he received the goods, then money Taobao to the seller. This is now Alipay. For Amazon, except...
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...Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world. At one time their mission was to revolutionize retailing. In some ways Amazon has done just that. Without Amazon’s lead we would not have as many online ventures that we see present today. Google and Microsoft are Amazon’s largest competitors. Both of these have put a dent in Amazon’s online business. Along the way, I believe Amazon strategy changed as they realized that there is much more than just their online retail services. “Amazon realized the need for computing storage and other services that can help companies and individuals run the technical and logistical parts of their business.” Amazon has the largest and most reliable infrastructure. This feature can and will help to attract many companies. “Amazon developed three services; Simple Storage Service (S3), the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and the Mechanical Turk.” “Amazon’s S3 is used to store data and applications. Amazon charges 15 cents per gigabyte per month to use this service.” “Amazon’s EC2 is used to rent our processing power starting at 10 cents an hour which is equal to one basic sever.” “The Mechanical Turk service combines processing power with networks of real people to do the kind of work that machines cannot do well, such as recognizing inappropriate images or transcribing audio.” This helps produce many online jobs for people. Companies find this a very effective way to store all of their information in one place. It also helps their business run...
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...Amazon Evolution Amazon has grown from an online bookstore to an online one stop superstore. You can buy anything from books to computer components and toys on their website. They were founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, and have grown exponentially since then. Information technology has helped them immensely along the way as this paper will demonstrate. They do everything from shopping to web-based applications involved in cloud computing for other businesses while staying true to their core competency. Amazon has appropriately evolved as a company to be successful in a high-tech environment. This company was founded in 1994 for selling books at a reasonable price. They made sure they had a good customer service to retain customers. By 1999 Amazon.com was formed, now Amazon really could reach a lot of customers due to the internet. So now they book stores and able to sell books to people at their own home, this was very convenient for customers. They did not have to leave their comfort of their own home. In 2000 Amazon opened their customer service center, this way the company could handle their customers in one location, saves on management and hourly’s. Because you have all of your staff in one location. In 2001 Amazon announces an alliance with Borders; this alliance increases inventory and variety of books they can offer on their web site. In 2003 the company expanded to sports and outdoor stores, this way they can try to gather in a new customer base, so...
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...Amazon With amazon services you choose a service plan based upon a completely virtual environment. Using a preconfigured AMI (amazon machine image) or creating your own with its own set of network permissions and protocols. This also chooses instance types you may want. Multiple services using AMI and with that utilize static endpoints or attach persistent block storage to said instances. The resources you use is what you will pay for out of the total plan you have chosen based upon time or data transfer. Amazon also has an elastic block store based service with offers persistent storage for amazon EC2 instances. EC2 is a program which you decide a system to boot into it so it can be stopped and restarted with the whim of the client. With this the EBS volumes can be measured and observed by the client. EC2 also provides multiple locations. This is based mainly open regions and available zones. Elastic or dynamic IP addresses are available for wireless and mobile devices that will use these cloud services. Virtual private could is a thing all its own that will create logically isolated sections of the amazon web services which you can launch within your AWS resources to create a virtual network which you can also select your own section of IP addresses, subnets, and configuration of your route tables, networks and gateways. Within these services a Virtual private network (VPN). Amazon cloud watch is a service that monitors your data. This gives stats, graphs, and alarms when...
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...Both Amazon and eBay are two most important competitors in the industry of online shopping. A short foreword and the background history of both companies will offer a base for the better understanding of how both the companies stand where they are today and in what manner they manage their respective companies. The financial synopsis will also be provided to provide an understanding of the better investing options in either of the two companies. Introduction When Amazon.com opened for business on July 16, 1995, it was nothing more than a few people packing and shipping boxes of books from a two-car garage in Bellevue, Wash. Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, had left New York City for the Pacific Northwest, using some of his time on the road to write the company's business plan. Books were packed on a table made out of an extra door they found lying in the new home — a practice the company continues today in spirit by making many of the office's desks out of doors. Now, on its 15th anniversary, Amazon can raise a toast to being one of the largest online retailers in the world, selling everything from tubas and golf carts to dishwashers and diapers. On the other hand in September, 1995, 28-year-old software developer Pierre Omidyar, who had previously worked with Claris developing software for Apple computers, sat down to write the code that would eventually evolve into what we know as eBay today. Originally called AuctionWeb and hosted on the same server as Pierre's page...
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...Case Study: Cloud Computing | | Cloud computing is becoming a popular and efficient service for many companies. With the speed that technology is changing, it can be difficult for a company to stay ahead with the current systems and services available in the market. Cloud computing is one option companies have to address this issue. “With cloud computing, organizations can consume shared computing and storage resources rather than building, operating and improving infrastructure on their own,” (Varia and Mathew, 2012). Ericsson is a world leader in providing technology and services for telecommunication and they also utilize Amazon Web Services, a public cloud services provider. There are many benefits that Ericsson has seen while using AWS. One is cost reduction. With AWS, Ericsson only has to pay for the services that they need rather than being required to purchase an entire suite of software that they may not use. AWS also provides some other cost benefits, “AWS requires no up-front investment, long-term commitment, or minimum spend,” (Varia et al, 2012). Another benefit concerns automation and automated software updates. With automation in AWS, Ericsson is able to spend more time focusing on their products than on updating their software. It reduces the amount of time that Ericsson would have to spend on the maintenance of their software or other commodities they use to create their products. AWS takes the responsibility of managing and scaling the...
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...2013 CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 2 PROBLEM STATEMENT 3 DATA ANALYSIS 3 KEY DECISION CRITERIA 4 ALTERNATIVE ANALYSIS 4 RECOMMENDATIONS 7 ACTION AND IMPLEMENTATION PLAN 9 Executive Summary In 2010, Big Skinny CEO Kiril Alexandrov was looking to transcend from retail distribution and print advertising to the world of online marketing to achieve maximum growth. The retail sales pitch was an easy one, as Alexandrov focused on the value of the wallet and the impulsiveness of consumers (Benjamin & Kominers, 2012). Unfortunately, translating this type of sales pitch was much harder to do in the world of cyberspace. Big Skinny centered their online marketing efforts around display Ads, keyword searches, social media and relationships with online distributors and deep discounted sites such as Amazon and Groupon respectively. The expansion caused much hardship, as Big Skinny received negative feedback on the review website Yelp that stemmed from their Groupon experiment. They also faced a glitch in their online promotion that allowed 4,000 people to order free wallets from their online store. Big Skinny needs to refocus their online marketing strategy by getting rid of display Ads, refining keyword searches and severing ties with deep discounted sites. Big Skinny can create value for their product and manage their orders better by being more selective with who distributes their product and by keeping...
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