A Poster Child for Platforms – Amazon in the Enterprise
That post prominently applauded the impact felt by the success of Salesforce.com in paving the way for enterprises to recognize the opportunity to rethink and redesign how business processes are served. I also gave a nod to the fact that the business principle that underlies platform-based operations is cascading across many other front-office, mid-office, and back-office disciplines.
Well,
it’s appropriate for me to tip my hat to another of the trailblazers in this
transformation from legacy-laden to platform-nimble: Amazon.com.
Most
of us might think foremost of books and online retailing when we hear the name
Amazon. Increasingly, businesses are
recognizing Amazon for Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a leader in provisioning
compute/storage infrastructure services – the platform for computing capacity.
Yet,
Amazon has embraced and promoted the notion of platforms so thoroughly that it
prevails in virtually everything that they do.
It’s how the leadership think about the consumer, the access to the consumer,
and the ongoing relationship with the consumer.
Ditto for the enterprise.
My
colleague John Rossman just published a fascinating book called The Amazon Way.
John’s
perspectives are also published via his blog at http://on-amzn.com/
A
Business Week interview with John is also fascinating.
John
and I frequently compare notes on the profound changes we see in businesses of
all sizes and forms. John is fond of
telling the story of FBA – Fulfillment by Amazon – as one of the more successful
distribution “as a service” platforms that is helping to drive efficiencies for
so many businesses.
In a recent meeting with a CIO, just after AWS had made one of its recent dramatic price adjustments for its IaaS services, I was asked: "What are we supposed to do with our existing ITO agreements when the market for those services is so highly variable?" Indeed ... platforms deliver agility at an entirely new scale and pace.
If
you think that Amazon has revolutionized retailing, just wait to see what it is
planning for the enterprise. John’s
insights give a sense to the genuine conviction that Amazon’s leaders hold for
platform-based business models.
Peter
