177 storyteLLIng desIgn 177 Customer Perspective Randy, 41, Web Entrepreneur Randy is a passionate Web entrepreneur. After 18 years in the software industry he is now running his second startup, providing enterprise software through the Web. He spent 10 years of his career in large software companies and eight years in start-ups. Throughout his career, one constant struggle has been getting infrastructure investments right. To him, running servers to provide services was basically a commodity business, but a tricky one due to the enor- mous costs involved. Tight management was crucial; when you’re running a start-up you can’t invest millions in a server farm. But when serving the enterprise market, you’d better have a robust IT infrastructure in place. That’s why Randy was intrigued when a friend at Amazon.com told him about the new IT infrastructure services his company was launching. That was the answer to one of Randy’s most important in-house jobs: running his services on a world-class IT infrastructure, being able to scale quickly, and all the while paying only for what his company was actually using. That was exactly what Amazon’s Web Services ( 11 ) promised. With Amazon Simple Storage Systems (Amazon S3), Randy could plug into Amazon’s infrastructure through a so-called application program- ming interface (API)( 12 ) and store all the data and appli- cations for his own services on Amazon.com’s servers. The same went for Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (Amazon EC2). Randy didn’t have to build and maintain his own infrastructure to crunch the numbers for his enterprise application service. He could simply plug into Amazon and use its computing power in return for hourly usage fees ( 14 ). He immediately understood why the value was coming from the giant e-tailer rather than from IBM or Accenture. Amazon.com was providing and maintaining IT infrastructure ( 2 , 3 , 5 ) to serve its online retail busi- ness ( 7 ) every day on a global scale. This was its core competency. Taking the step to offer the same infrastruc- ture services to other companies ( 9 ) was not much of a stretch. And since Amazon.com was in retail, a business with low margins ( 11 ), it had to be extremely cost- effi cient ( 5 ), which explained the rock-bottom prices of its new Web Services. amazon web services: s3, ec2, sqs, other web services companies and developers aPIs utility computing fees fulfi llment it infrastruc- ture & software development & maintenance it infrastruc- ture & software fulfi llment infrastructure technology & content fulfi llment (marketing) online retail shop consumer market amazon.com sales margins 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 E-commerce Infrastructure bmgen_final.indd 177 6/15/10 5:43 PM