Analysis of Managing Organizational Infrastructure of Ebay Company

Executive summary

Among the most popular e-businesses, eBay positions in one of the top e-businesses around the globe. The eBay community as well as the active users are increasing day by day at fast pace. Introduction Among the top successful ecommerce sites eBay is one of the prominent web-based enterprise in the whole world. eBay enables business to consumer and consumer to consumer sales through their ecommerce site. It allows their customers/users to surf their website called ebay. com and find the things they are looking forto buy or if they want to sell something they can also do that as well by posting the product for sale online (Ahmed p. 1).

From the beginning of eBay September 1995, this web-based business has enabledthetransactions worth billion of dollars and is currently serving people in many countries including Australia, France, Ireland, UK, Canada etc (Marshak 2003 p. 2) Information system and technology play a vital role in the success of the company. There are no warehouses, inventories or any physical store location of eBay. This business uses technology and the information systems which enables the people to sell and buy things online. They generate their revenue from the commissions that they receive when the products are sold (Chen 2005 p. 77).

Information technology infrastructure

To get to the full potential, e-business needs to develop a strong and appropriate support infrastructure (Galant Jakubczyc and Paprzycki 2002). IT infrastructure is the core thing that is used in entire e-business platforms. It is used to interlinked parts of the organization with its customers, suppliers and associates. Information technology infrastructure investment is as important as physical infrastructure investments in machines, equipment, plant and land (Weill and Vitale 2001 p. 1). IT infrastructure includes hardware, software, communication resources, management, data centers, physical plant and the data electronically stored (Weill and Vitale 2001 p. 2). Pierre Omidyar the founder of eBay-built eBay application. Initially which was just a homegrown auction application. His original application which was a two-tier application and was built on C++ language. The system was limited and does not have the potential to handle the increased traffic neither can carry the different business processes other than eBay auctions (Chen 2005 p. 78). With the time eBay grew itself and in 2005 eBay comprises of 200 database servers and 20 search servers. eBay has an architecture like a grid computing which makes eBay more efficient. Apart from the search function, approximately 50 servers can be used to run everything about eBay. Servers include application servers, web servers and data stores (Julia Layton 2005).

How eBay manage its IT infrastructure

In this we will analyse how different components including web servers, web clients, databases, application servers interact with each other and how eBay manages them.

Web browsers

The customer uses company’s website through a web browser such as Microsoft internet explorer or Google chrome. User interface is supported by the web browsers and customers can make a selection of anything using the eBay’s website. After the customer has submitted the request this system software transfer the data across the network.

Proxy servers

Proxy server will receive the requests from the web browsers. These servers cache are continuously accessing web pages so when ever a user want to recover anything they can retrieve it with out actually accessing the website. On the contrary, if the customer wants to sell or bid on a certain item then the real time data must be shown to him/her. These kinds of servers are often located near to the customers and on the same network, therefore with the help of this great amount of resources can be saved (Ahmad p. 4). Load balancing and web servers Load balancing component is one of the important part of the eBay website as it promotes and maintains availability, performance and scalability. The primary purpose of the load balancer is to split the load (incoming requests) among set of computers operating web servers. Therefore, improving the performance.

Additionally, load balancer also looks after the computers and if one of them shuts down then it diverts the incoming requests to the other set of computers thus it supports availability. From the load balancer then the requests are forwarded to the web server. These server holds the capacity to do multithreading. After processing from here webserver sends it to an application server which responds using the database services. Application server and Databases Application server receives the requests from the web servers. Application servers operate in the middle of the eBay business rules. Business logic and connectivity is implemented through these servers, which make sure how the customers and the servers will interact. EJ2EE application server framework is being used by the eBay replacing C++ ISAPI which was being operated before. Requests finally reaches to the databases and here it is transformed into an instruction to change, add or extract the information. Below is the picture showing different components of IT infrastructure eBay has and how they interact with each other (Ahmed p. 3)

Challenges faced bye

Bay and suggestion to overcomeAs eBays business evolved, the company faced several issues related to its infrastructure and forced to expand themselves in different ways. Growing requirements As eBay expanded the website was not enough to handle the traffic. It could be by the visits, minutes spent on the site, registered members, items placed on the platform or the number of transactions done. eBay is continuously restructuring their scalability (Marshak 2003 p. 3). Secondly, the growth in the services eBay is providing and are intending to offer in the coming time. eBay has introduced bunch of new services such as eBay stores and buy it now. From the initial auction model eBay has expanded their services in new directions (Marshak 2003 p. 3).

Vendor management PayPal being the vendor of eBay has introduced different retail point of sale solutions like paypal here. If PayPal remain growing point of sales transactions, then this can lead to fraudulent activities ultimately demaging eBay through increase in fraud and associated risks such as transaction losses. PayPal business is continuously growing but it has not enough experience and operating history to handle the internal controls. So due to this customer funds can be mismanaged which can put eBay business on a risk. Therefore, PayPal should enhance their internal controls so that they can gain public confidence by handling massive and increasing customer transactions (Nasdak eBay 2012 p. 34). Scalability eBay in November and December, 2000 were faced with some serious issues on scalability as they had designed their data architecture but their hardware was not sufficient enough.

At that time they were using Oracle database and the Solaris operating system designed by Sun microsystems. Afterwards, eBay did some noticeable upgradations such as shifting from one database server to a storage area network designed by Sun StorEdge (Marshak 2003 p. 4). Now a days eBay has become so global that it has been used by massive audience. E-Businesses are operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with buyers shopping in different time zones. Application traffic is growing at a fast rate, which puts the eBay management to make scalabilty their most important concern(Mansi 2017). By analysing the past trend it is suggested that eBay must think of expanding themselves continuously to meet up with the great demand in the future. System failureseBay have experienced system failures which drastically affects the availability of the websites, services and applications. As a result eBay faces the reduction in the revenue and the profit generated. In 2012, some issues related to technical systems resulted eBays customers to face some serious problems such as they were unable to checkout from the eBay site for several hours (Nasdak eBay 2017p. 27. )

Disaster Recovery Plan eBay’s system is reliable and is designed in a way that can remain vulnerable to natural disasters including, floods, earthquakes and cyber-attacks. However, few of the systems are not fully protective such as Shopping. com and the system being used by Bill Me later business. The disaster Recovery Plan is not enough to tackle all the eventualities (Nasdak eBay 2012 p. 35). Challenges of Managing infrastructure Information technology is consisted of various components such as different servers, data centers applications, web sites, operating systems and various databases. All of these information technology components are the basis of giant companies and with out them businesses cannot work. Though, managing all of these components is a very complex task. One of the reasons managing infrastructure is made complex is due to the lack of skilled personnel. Selected people are experts in managing the infrastructure (Ashrafiand Baghdadi 2008 p. 398).

There are several issues that come up and require expertise. Like company is expanding its horizons so what kind of technology will be suitable for the selected new market. So it is essential to have experienced IT managers who can understand the organization and things better. As eBay is one of a giant company and is expanding it self in new directions. In order to coupe up with the traffic they have to install new infrastructure having different components. When an additional hardware and software is added in the IT architecture such as servers, database, storage systems etc then management and control become a critical challenge for the businesses (. Another problem due to which managing infrastructure has become so complex for the professionals is due to the vendors. PayPal, one of the prominent vendors of eBay. If PayPal fails to manage their work, then ultimately it will harm the eBay business.

Conclusion

No matter how big organization is there are always some issues in managing organizational infrastructure. Ebay is an technological organization which continually invests in technology and updates its infrastructure to achieve competitive advantage and to remain competitive. Ebay should manage its infrastructural issues as organizational environment is going complex and alot of competitors are trying to achieve the success of Ebay.