Fundamentals of Analytics and Business Intelligence

Serving more than a billion customers

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1.  The Organization:

1.1. Brief History of the Organization:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the flagship company of the world’s largest E-

commerce group Amazon.com. It is the world largest provider of cloud-computing

services also known as remote computing services or web services. It operates from 11

key geographical regions across the world in US East (Northern Virginia), where the

majority of AWS servers are based, US West (northern California), US West (Oregon),

Brazil (São Paulo), Europe (Ireland and Germany), Southeast Asia (Singapore), East Asia

(Tokyo and Beijing) and Australia (Sydney). Each Region is wholly contained within a

single country and its entire infrastructure, data and services stay within the designated

Region. The most central and profitable of the 52 Amazon Web services are Amazon

Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2" and Amazon Simple Storage Service, also

known as "S3". Amazon markets AWS as a service to provide large computing capacity

more quickly, efficiently and more cheaply than a client company building an actual

physical server farm. As of October 2015, Amazon Web Services operated an estimated

1.7 Million servers across 32 availability zones. Amazon's total revenue represented 15

per cent year-on-year growth amounting to $22.72bn. In this year’s first quarter

announcement by its CEO Jeff Bozos the AWS division's revenue grew by 49 per cent

amounting to 1.57 billion in the first quarter of the year and US$265 million of operating

income. It is presently world fastest growing E-commerce company by Forbes magazine.

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1.2 Organizational Chart:

The AWS Organizational chart illustrates the hierarchal structure of the company:

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Definition of problem:

The industry of cloud computing service is a viciously aggressive field with the main

players being the titans of IT industry like Microsoft, Google, IBM etc., Amazon.com

being a pioneering world leader with the largest number of web services and

infrastructure foot print has to maintain its competitive advantage by enhancing its

operational efficiency and extending its services globally. To achieve these goals it must

design and execute innovative and cost cutting cloud based technologies to further bolster

its web services. To maintain a strategic competitive edge over its competitors both in

innovative e-commerce services and customer satisfaction, it has started to implement

Cloud computing solutions to solve the below five problems:

1) People’s mindset of Amazon being a Book publishing and selling website

2) Costly warehouse maintenance of in house products and affiliate products.

3) Complex administration hierarchy of logistics and ware house maintenance.

4) Assurance of 100% speedy delivery of own products and affiliate products.

5) Customer and affiliate management through cloud based SRM & CRM services.

With its E-commerce website Amazon.com has captured a global market with

customers spread all over the world. Not only the revenues are huge, the challenges of

sales, marketing, logistics and product delivery are manifold huge too. To solve this

global network problem Amazon has invented many innovative cloud based services like

Amazon Product advertising, Amazon 100% Fulfilment web services, Amazon Gift

Code On Demand, Amazon kinesis, AWS Partner Network, Amazon HSM etc.,

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5. References:

1. "Amazon Web Services About Us". Amazon.com. September 2011..

2. "Regions and Endpoints". aws.amazon.com..

3. "What is Cloud Computing by Amazon Web Services | AWS". Aws.amazon.com.

4. Amazon Cloud Backed by 450,000 Servers

5. AWS GovCloud (US) Region FAQs

6. "Just how big is Amazon’s AWS business? Geek.com.

7. Pomerantz, David. "AWS and Sustainable Energy". Amazon.

8. Burt, Jeffrey. "AWS to Build Solar Farm to Help Power Cloud Data Centers". eWeek

9. "Benjamin Black – EC2 Origins". Blog.b3k.us. 2009-01-25.

10. "Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon Simple Queue Service Beta".

Aws.typepad.com.

11. Bort, Julie (28 March 2012). "Amazon's Game-Changing Cloud Was Built By Some

Guys In South Africa". Business Insider.

12. "Amazon.com-News Release". Phx.corporate-ir.net.

13. “Amazon.com-A new age Enterprise”- CNN Finance News-July 6 2013

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2.1 Analysis:

After the decision for migrating the whole of the Amazon e-commerce site to AWS cloud facility,

the below studies are conducted:

1) Requirement Analysis

2) Feasibility Report

3) Formulation of Alternative Solutions

4) Comparison of Alternative Solutions

5) Alternative solutions selection

1) Requirement Analysis

In this stage customer’s business needs are identified, evaluated the proposed system for

feasibility, perform economic and technical analysis, allocate functions to identified

system elements, establish schedule and constraints and create new system definitions.

Requirements analysis is the selection of those tasks that go into determining the business

needs to meet for a new project. These requirements should be identified, documented,

actionable, measurable, related to identified business needs to a level of detail sufficient

for system design. The requirements analysis includes three types of tasks:

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1)Eliciting requirements: Discover and gather all the business process that go into the

creation of the new project. This is sometimes also called requirements gathering.

2) Analyzing requirements: determining whether the gathered requirements are clear,

complete, and consistent in resolving the business process conflicts.

3) Recording requirements: the gathered requirements must be documented in various

forms, like a summary list and use cases or process specifications.

This analysis report for Amazon Web services details the business requirements like

1) Cost cutting in the present operations

2) Agility in web service delivery

3) Shorter time to market

4) Reduced investment

5) Overall Operational efficiency improvement

2) Feasibility Report:

A feasibility study is conducted to assess the viability of implementing cloud computing

solutions. It is the most important step in the life cycle of a new project. It is conducted to

calculate the success rate of solving the issue areas through the cloud computing solutions. This

is done through identifying the 1) Economic feasibility 2) Technological feasibility, 3) legal

feasibility and alternative solution feasibility.

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3) Formulation of Alternate Solutions: A study of all three alternate solutions to address the

business needs was done using the SFF Matrix: Suitability, Feasibility & Flexibility

Suitability Feasibility Flexibility Total

Managed
Alternative A 4.6 6.7 11.3
Services

Third Party
Alternative B 4.2 5.2 9.4
Hosting

Centralized
Alternative C 6.7 3.1 9.8
Resources

Rate each alternative on a scale of 1 - 10 for its

 Suitability: whether it is efficient in resolving the business needs. Is it adequate in

response to the business needs?

 Feasibility: refers to the resources that will be needed to solve the problem - will it solve

the problem? Is it economical? Is it good for the company?

 Flexibility: refers to your ability to respond to unintended consequences or new

possibilities? the alternative itself, and whether you can control outcomes once you

begin.

From the total score for each alternative, compare, prioritize your alternative accordingly.

4) Comparison of Alternate solutions

A detailed study of all the three alternate solutions available in market was conducted using the

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Thomas Saaty's Analytical Hierarchy Matrix and the most suitable solutions to address all the

five persisting business issues were found to be Cloud Computing.

5) Alternate Solution Selection:

All existing alternate technology solutions were analyzed in depth in technological terms,

economical terms and commercial terms and the best solution was found to be managed

services by cloud computing. As Amazon has its own web services it is also viable to migrate all

its business data centers to cloud based managed services.

4. Implementation Plan

1) Project Plan

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After conducting a comprehensive research study into Amazons e-commerce company,

its historical evolution, business strategy and its existing competitors, I propose that being

a mature business that has saturated the e-commerce lower domain and middle domain

market it is richly implied to move its e-commerce site to AWS. This seems to be the

only logical way it can retain the world dominance and sustain its 13%-49% annual

growth rate. To sustain it for future it has to adopt cloud computing solutions to is e-

commerce division in its entire business cycle.

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The complete 12 months project schedule planning was done with the help of Gantt chart, in

which a series of horizontal lines depicts the activities to be completed in the scheduled period

of time in comparison to the amount of work scheduled for the given periods of time. On the

top of the chart is the allocated time schedule is listed and on the left of the chart is a list of the

activities to be completed in that scheduled time period. Each scheduled project activity is

represented by a bar; the position and length of the bar reflects the start date, duration and end

date of the activity. This allows a viewer of the chart to see at a glance:

 the various project activities to be completed

 The scheduled start and ending dates of or each project activity

 Duration of time each task completion is scheduled to last

 The time when the scheduled activities overlap with other scheduled activities, and by

what magnitude do they overlap

 The scheduled start and end date of the different activities in the whole project

To put it in a short, a Gantt chart displays what activities has to be done (the project tasks),

when (time and date schedule) and the amount of tasks to be completed.

2) Change Management plan

With every new project implementation there arrives a significant change in the regular

functioning business cycle of the company. All the changes to processes, systems, organization

structures and/or job roles will have both a technical side and a people side attached to them.

Both Project management and change management have evolved as twin disciplines to provide

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the needed structure and the tools needed to manage and realize change successfully on the

technical and people side. Change management is the process, organizational tools and

techniques to be executed by all levels of Company workers to achieve the required business

outcome. As illustrated in the below diagram, both project management and change

management parallel props up an organization from a current state (existing system of project

execution), through a transition state to a desired future state (proposed system of project

execution).

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3) Testing & Transition Plan

The main purpose of transition planning is to identify the right team and delegate to them

the tasks and activities that are needed to be executed in the new project implementation,

so that the project is efficiently delivered from the inception stage to development stage

to pilot phase to the production operations and finally maintenance stages. The transition

plan identifies the transition team personnel, their hierarchical organization, their roles

and responsibilities, the skills, technology, knowledge, and methodologies that are

necessary to perform an efficient and effective transition. Even emergency contingency

planning and risk mitigation team is also delegated its work. A final change management

report will be produced illustrating the key changes of the transition from the existing

infrastructure, operations and support staff and to the new project environment.

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