Question

John is currently an engineer at an automobile manufacturer in Ontario. Next year he is going to start his own automobile parts manufacturing company in Vancouver. He wants his company to be entirely e-commerce and he wants to sell his products to retailers of automotive parts and accessories, such as Lordco. He needs to know how to find and connect with customers but he is unsure how to do so. John also is worried about buying the right hardware and software because he only has a limited amount of money to spend. He knows that product ordering and billing is a critical part of doing business online and he has a lot to learn. Most of all, John is concerned about online theft of information so he wants to make sure that from the time a customer makes an order until the parts are delivered that all information is safe. This will be John’s first time in business and he is a little unsure of himself. He decides that he needs to hire you to describe to him some of the basics about the type of e-commerce business he is getting into and also to help him solve his business problems. You are a business expert and knowledge worker and you have studied Busi 237. Using the key terms and concepts from your textbook explain what John needs to do.

Answer 1

Below are the suggestions, ideas, advice, and consultation provided in general, from a broad perspective:

Since this scenario and requirement is about Electronic Commerce, the e-commerce business model this would come under is Business to Business (B2B), as John's business would sell its products or services to another business such as retailers of automotive parts and accessories, such as Lordco, where the buyer here, resells to the consumers. This business model will have a longer sales cycle. However, it will have a higher order value and more recurring purchases, all of which John wants it to be his next venture.

As John is an engineer at an automobile manufacturer, working as an automobile engineer, who may not have the required Computer and Information Systems knowledge, expertise, or work experience to set up his own official Ecommerce website or e-commerce business online on the Internet, he could simply go for and use Cloud Computing technology, so he can only focus on his core business of manufacturing automobile parts for the most part, however dedicating his time and effort only a little bit for doing his seeling business on his e-commerce website and carry out fulfillment process to deliver the products to his retailers of automotive parts and accessories such as Lordco. Opting for Cloud Computing technology will eliminate one from being bothered by time and effort requirements to be put in the underlying Information Technology (IT) infrastructure such as hardware, software, networking, servers, cabling, racking, stacking, powering, databases, storage media, applications, websites, their maintenance, administration, management, monitoring, security, etc.

Hence, John could and should go for a Public Cloud Service Provider (CSP) available in the market. It is recommended, he creates an account with Amazon for an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, which provides hundreds of cloud services, resources, solutions, features, and options. John could create, host, and deploy his official business website or e-commerce website on AWS with a very little administration. He can also purchase a domain name (website name, for example, www.example.com) for his e-commerce business from a domain registrar through AWS public CSP. He can purchase hardware and software on AWS on an on-demand basis on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, using the AWS cloud services and resources as and when he needs them, and paying for only those resources he has used. The e-commerce website that John would be using could use this public cloud deployment model on AWS successfully.

Below is how this can be achieved:
Discussion about John's E-Commerce website i.e., say, JohnAutomobiles.com, accessed by his buyers or retailers, the website itself can be created, hosted or deployed, run, and rendered using public cloud deployment model on Amazon Web Services (AWS) public Cloud Service Provider (CSP). The website would not create any problem to a great extent to anyone, hopefully. JohnAutomobiles.com E-Commerce or online shopping website could use this B2B business model successfully for its growth and profitability.

JohnAutomobiles.com website could be deployed or migrated (in case, there is already an on-premise data center) to AWS implementing in its IT infrastructure on the AWS cloud platform following the main concepts or characteristics acting as pillars for the entire JohnAutomobiles.com architecture on AWS:
* Decoupling.
* Implementing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
* Scaling horizontally.
* Increasing the execution speed.
* Developing iteratively.
* Seeking simplicity.

The website could use S3, which is the Simple Storage Service offered by AWS providing object storage through a web service interface. They could use S3 as a service and store raw HTML for the feature in S3, both as solutions to address the coupled release process problem; runtime latency problem; scaling requirements problem; and service integration problems.

They can have an IT architecture in the cloud of AWS platform, where they can enjoy results with reduced page latency; IMDB that need not worry about scaling anymore, reduced webserver CPU utilization, due to reduced dependencies; they could enjoy improved availability, simplified release model; and AJAX readiness.

The JohnAutomobiles.com E-Commerce website could use as many AWS services as possible to reduce moving parts in the system that are in lots; to avoid running in an external data center, and to increase scaling up quickly. All these issues and problems could be eliminated opting for the AWS cloud.

After the JohnAutomobiles.com E-Commerce website is deployed onto AWS, they would require very few dev resources; they do not have to negotiate any new datacenter Colocation center presence for their launch; they can enjoy true external performance metrics; they would be able to test site features in development that have not yet launched, and for any large amounts of web traffic of requests from their customers, i.e., buyers or retailers the system could scale horizontally. Thus, they can deploy the entire www.JohnAutomobiles.com web server fleet to AWS cloud to avoid any underutilization of any retail website hardware; avoiding any heroic effort that could be required to be taken in the case of spikes in the web traffic of buyers' requests; and to eliminate non-linear scaling.

Now, AWS would serve all traffic for JohnAutomobiles.com, 100%. They or the website would be able to dynamically scale the fleet incrementally with as small as a single host and would be able to easily handle traffic spikes. Also, they could create and use a tiered storage system with AWS for the DB use case to eliminate the below problems:
* Scaling that would get impacted due to cumulative data.
* In case, they do not have any ideal database scaling pattern.
* In case, database infrastructure is expensive.

JohnAutomobiles.com E-Commerce website would learn business lessons such as:
* Their capacity planning time to be reduced to a less amount.
* The conversations they might have with the finance team or department would be fewer.
* It would enable them to innovate their business more.
* Their developers would be happier as they do not have to be bothered by the underlying IT infrastructure requirements.
* For AWS price reductions, the JohnAutomobiles website gets the credit.
* They would not have lease returns anymore.

Technically, they would have to start to deploy or create simple applications on AWS. They would need to iterate toward their desired end-state. Reusable components should be identified if any. They should treat security as partners and engage them early. They, along with their architectural objectives, should deploy and create in the cloud in concert. They should make sure their engineering (JohnAutomobiles's) is not sloppy, as the cloud would not be able to cover that up. SSL certificates to be bought and installed on all payments and financial related webpages of the website for strong security reasons.