Big business today tends to put the bean counters and lawyers into the driving seat. Not so Amazon, now the world’s biggest online retailer of new, refurbished and second hand items in an ever-growing list of categories, way beyond the books with which the company started out.
It is 50-year old Chief Technology Officer Dr Werner Vogels who, working alongside founder Jeff Bezos, has become the familiar voice of Amazon. Customer communication underpins his philosophy: “Ingrained into everything we do is a single-minded focus on the needs of our customers,” he argues, adding, “Take care of them and the bottom-line will take care of itself.”
Vogels continues: ‘We are constantly devising new services, introducing new features to existing services and improving approaches to things we are already doing.
“Customer feedback is paramount to this. We gather feedback constantly from various sources and have a big team of solution architects helping to define customer architectures.
“There’s also important input from independent solution vendors building on our services, from system integration partners who flag up customer needs to us, from various advisory boards and from our team of Amazon e-commerce engineers building on the Amazon Web Services platform.” Besides being the man who spreads the Amazon gospel through his role as its usual spokesman, Vogels is charged with developing technical innovation within a company that now has a 21,000 strong workforce.
Reflecting his crucial role, he is not only CTO but Vice President Worldwide Architecture of the organisation he joined in September 2004 as Director of Systems Research.
The holder of a PhD in computer science from Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit, where Professors Andy Tanenbaum and Henri Bal were his mentors, Vogels was a senior researcher at INESC in Lisbon from 1991 to 1994, leading to a 10 year stint as a research scientist at the computer science department of Cornell University, through till 2004, conducting research into scalable reliable enterprise solutions. From 1999 through 2002, he was Chief Technology Officer and Vice President at Reliable Network Solutions Inc.
Renowned as one of the great innovators in his field, Vogels has written countless magazine and journal articles and spoken on distributed systems technologies at conferences around the world. In 2001, while at Cornell, he launched his now heavily read technology-orientated weblog http://www.allthingsdistributed.com, which has, since he joined Amazon, become more product orientated.
He has become very much the driving force behind the architecture of Amazon Web Services, the company’s market-leading approach to so-called cloud computing.
Cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online which are accessed from a web browser while the software and data are stored on servers.
“It’s a radical new approach with a brilliant future,” he enthuses, having spent much of his time travelling the world spreading the gospel. The influential Information Week trade magazine recognised this educational and promotional role by awarding Vogels its 2008 CIO/CTO of the Year award.
“He has emerged as the right person, at the right time and in the right place to guide cloud computing – until now an emerging technology for early adopters – into the mainstream,” read the citation, adding, “He not only understands how to architect a global computing cloud consisting of tens of thousands of servers, but also how to engage CTOs, CIOs and other professionals at customer companies in a discussion of how that architecture could potentially change the way they approach IT.
Amazon aspires to be ‘the earth’s most customer-centric company’. Vogels’ job description as an ‘external-facing technologist’ isn’t just consistent with that mission statement, it’s cutting edge. “Too many CIOs, CTOs and IT organisations as a whole remain internally focused. They get treated like a cost centre because they are a cost centre – they don’t venture outside their organisations.
“Vogels, in contrast, is constantly on the road, talking with customers about what Amazon can do to address their computing needs in its data centres, then reporting back to the rest of the AWS team with ideas on how to make it happen.”
If you think Vogels’ situation is different because he works for a vendor, think again. It has become undeniable that CIOs and CTOs across business and industry must get better at articulating the business value of their technology to their customers. It’s no surprise that Vogels enthuses so much about building a customer-orientated architecture at Amazon.
Though best known as a massively successful on-line bookstore, Amazon has evolved into something much more than that. Says Vogels: “You have to realise that this is first and foremost a technology company that has developed from one of the world’s most successful online retailers, with 55 million active accounts, into a sophisticated platform on which more than a million active retail partners now do business worldwide.”
Perhaps appropriately, Douglas Hofstadter’s ‘Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought’ was the first book sold on amazon.com.
The business survived the burst of the dot.com bubble and has grown tremendously: “We work quickly but we are in for the long-term,” is how one insider puts it.
In well under a decade it has become a truly global business, a prime illustration of the phenomenal power of the internet. In the UK, as an example, it is now rated as the favourite source for music and video and the third most used retailer overall. Building a high street chain on such a scale would have taken many decades.
As importantly as the amazing growth of its own site, Amazon now also runs retail web sites for Marks & Spencer, Mothercare, Lacoste, Times Corporation, Target, Timex and Sears Canada among others. Turnover is not everything, of course, and the business is still running a monumental deficit – the price paid for such rapid expansion – but share prices reflect investor sentiment that this is a business with a spectacular future.
“One of our biggest challenges comes with developing such a complex and large-scale business while each individual customer is only interested in what’s happening with the blockbuster video or intended birthday present they are waiting for,” says Vogels, ” Each and every customer has to be seen as equally important. We have to cope to working with different languages and different alphabets so the customer in Paris, Abu Dhabi or Tokyo gets the same level of service as the customer in New York or London.”