Dr. Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer of Amazon.com, has been quietly building Amazon’s reputation among developers with S3 and cloud computing.
The push to deliver software as a service is forcing many software development companies to worry about challenges like datacenter management, hard-disk reliability, server uptime and router instabilities. These companies are quickly realizing that delivering a cost-effective service with guaranteed performance is a highly specialized activity.
Early reports indicate that these companies spend 70%-80% of their investment on common activities that are not unique to their business. This “heavy lifting” takes so much time, energy and resources that only a small fraction of the investment is actually spent on moving their product forward.
