he infrastructure is also admired for features like customer-tracking which keeps track of customer purchases and recommends similar product selections each time they log on to the Amazon.com web site. The company’s technology infrastructure is also admired for its ability to rapidly launch new services like its auction site with technology that allows customers to bid on auction items, keeps track of their bids, automatically bids higher if another bid beats their bid if the customer chooses this options, and notifies the customer if their maximum bid has been outbid by someone else.
Like any other business trying to retain a competitive advantage over the competition, cut costs, and increase profits through technology, rapid changes and adapting are part of the technology game. No longer facing brick-and-mortar start-ups as E-commerce competitors and after five years and almost twenty million customers, Amazon.com’s IT infrastructure is straining at the seems. Never one to lag behind and a company that spends more than it earns, Amazon.com has taken aggressive proactive measures to expand and update its IT infrastructure:
I an effort to pump up that infrastructure, the company has been on an IT shopping spree. In recent weeks, Amazon.com revealed a deal with Excelon Corp. for business-to-business integration software and another SAS Institute Inc. for data-analysis applications. They’re the latest in a string of purchases that includes products from Epiphany, Hewlett-Packard, Manugistics, and Oracle.
(Foley, Konicki, and Hulme, 2000, 2)
The deal with Hewlett-Packard is huge in the industry. Formerly, Amazon.com relied heavily on Sun Microsystems for its information technology products. In an effort to create a new IT infrastructure, the company announced it was switching from Sun to Hewlett-Packard. Amazon.com prominently features Hewlett-Packard merchandise in its Electronics Store department of its web site...