eBay is the world's largest online marketplace and a mobile commerce leader, connecting 93 million buyers and sellers who can shop for and sell practically anything. The value of goods sold on eBay in 2009 was nearly $60 billion, which translates into approximately $2,000 worth of sales every second.
It takes a huge technical infrastructure to support this level of trading, so the company needed to find ways to boost efficiency and make substantial service improvements. Microsoft's cloud-based Windows Azure Platform offered a new approach that would allow the retail giant to accelerate its application development capabilities, also making them more efficient and more cost effective than before. eBay asked us, and our parent company Accenture, to design a proof of concept to demonstrate how Windows Azure might work in eBay's highly customized, Java-based environment.
We focussed on migrating eBay's single-page site for hot commodity items to the Windows Azure platform. This site was chosen because it always had to be capable of dealing with peaks and troughs in demand for popular items. We built build this type of marketplace in the cloud and with hooks into the retailer's existing operations and monitoring framework.
In just a few weeks, we developed a hosting solution for this retailer's sub-site on the Windows Azure platform and confirmed that the retailer could provision application development services and host marketplace applications on the public cloud. This allowed the retailer to experience the platform's flexibility, scalability, cost advantages and ease-of-use. And it also provided valuable insights into how cloud computing could be incorporated into a long-term infrastructure vision.
See how Avanade helped eBay deliver exceptional flexibility, scalability and cost efficiency across its huge,
extended infrastructure with
the Windows Azure platform.
Download the case study
or listen to our podcast.
Learn more >>
