ABSTRACT: This week we noted an excellent interview in Information Week with the CTO of Amazon. 'We've Just Scratched The Surface' July 26, 2004. You might think everything that could possibly be said about Amazon and Web Services has already been said! Well it's true Amazon WS has had a lot of coverage. But what we found interesting about this interview is the maturity of the business understanding that Amazon displays. It provides much food for thought for enterprises implementing SOA.
In the next few weeks, Amazon.com will release Amazon Web Services 4.0, the next version of their toolset for developing Web Service based applications that use Amazon's services. Over the past two years, 50,000 developers have downloaded earlier versions of Amazon Web Services.
AMAZON: ". . .let's think about everything we do at Amazon.com and about how we break it up into individual pieces, smaller pieces. What we try to do is break apart a piece of the business."
From a technology point of view, that becomes a service.
From an organizational point of view, it becomes an autonomous team with their own mission, and then we work on defining the interface to get to that service. “
Heavy stuff - Amazon recognize that Web Services change everything, technology, business model and the organization. In our maturity model we expect that it's only in a third stage that an organization starts reengineering the core business model and the organization to become a service oriented business. Fundamental principle - the service oriented business is organized in service bearing components, with managed separation of organization, business model and technology. (although we are not sure SOB will be the hottest acronym of 2005?)
Links:
CBDI Report - Towards the Service-Based Business
CBDI Report - Service Oriented Architecture Part 2 - The Bridge
CBDI Report - Towards the Service-Oriented Organization, Understanding, Planning and Managing the Organizational Change Implicit in Service Oriented Architecture
AMAZON: "When we launched it a couple years ago, it was really a kind of an experiment. We thought it would be interesting to take the functionality of our Web site and make it available to developers. And primarily what we were thinking of were the [Amazon.com] associate Web sites. What's happened is that people have built businesses on our Web services, . . . "
If you still think Web Services are all about better forms of interoperability, stop right here. Amazon is a real world demonstration that Web Services are a discontinuous technology that impacts business, not just IT
Moreover it also impacts vendors of traditional software solutions such as e-commerce packages. Who needs the cost of acquiring and implementing such packages, and the associated databases, hardware, etc, etc, when you can just access it as a Service?
Links:
CBDI Report -GrandCentral and the Value Added Service Network Practical Steps towards the Vision of Delivering Software as a Service
AMAZON: "When we started this program, we had a very deliberate strategy of erring on the side of providing more functionality than we thought would be necessary to developers in the outside world, and that's really paid off. People have used the functionally to do things that we wouldn't have anticipated, as opposed to a strategy of kind of figuring out what you think people are going to build and making the pieces available for what you think they're going to do. My advice would be to go bottom up and expose as much of your technology as you can and let the developers in the outside world innovate."
For some time now we have been emphasizing separation. Only by separating providers and consumers can you break free of the old millennium mindset of building systems for (specific) users. You have to build services in a manner that can be used (imaginatively) by anyone. And this is equally applicable to internal services as external services. We also recommend that organizations carefully consider the design of Agile Services that are able to support unforeseen requirements rather than just the immediate obvious need.
Links:
CBDI Report - Service Based Packaged Applications
CBDI Report: Component Based Service Engineering
CBDI Report - Business Flexibility - Implementing Context Driven Services
Service-Oriented Architecture: Considerations for Agile Systems Lawrence Wilkes and Richard Veryard
AMAZON: " . . there's an enormous amount of information and interesting [processes] that are out there. If it was all exposed via Web services so that developers could integrate that stuff together, people would do incredible things with it. I think that's already starting to happen, and we'll see that accelerate. If businesses want to participate in that, they're going to have to make their underlying technology available via Web services."
Links:
CBDI Report - The Service-Based Business – Telecoms
CBDI Report: The Service-Based Business - Insurance
AMAZON: "So we are recruiting like mad in the Web-services organization. We've had success with this program, and we think that we've just scratched the surface, so we're going to go full bore in exposing all of our platform via Web services and making it even easier than it is today for developers, use more outreach programs, encourage more people to build applications, and just keep this whole positive feedback spinning."
Of course Amazon are different aren't they!!
Links:
CBDI Report - A Web Services Maturity Model
Reprogramming Amazon - Business Week, December 2003
Amazon CTO: 'We've Just Scratched The Surface' Information Week, July 26, 2004
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