Last week, eBay
said it might offer the giant data warehouse that it has been using for
internal business analytics as a business intelligence service to
external customers.
It’s
no surprise that companies who have built and maintained successful
technologies for internal use decide to add it to their portfolio of
customer offerings. If a technology has worked for the company’s
employees and has allowed it to run its business better than it could
have otherwise, then why not let customers reap the benefits as well?
Actually,
it’s much like taking your great grandmother’s proven secret muffin
recipe and making a business out of it. The recipe has been tried and
tweaked over the generations and is now ready for mass public
consumption.
But eBay isn’t alone in this approach.Amazon.com
Inc., too, did a similar thing when it began offering its in-house
Amazon Web Services to external customers, specifically the application
hosting service Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and the hosted storage
service S3.
And
so did Hewlett Packard Co. when it began offering Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) data centre asset management a couple of years
ago. HP had been extensively using RFID in-house when it decided to
apply that expertise to design an offering to help customers better
manage and automate their data centres. Following a series of pilots at
HP Labs, a customer offering was eventually created. (Read about the growth of RFID as a data centre asset management tool.)
But
as for eBay, it isn’t out of the woods just yet. The recipe still needs
a bit of tweaking. One issue the company has identified is the large
amount of time it will take for customers to upload big volumes of data
to the warehouse.
At
any rate, offering a successful in-house technology to external
customers is a service that markets itself by virtue of the fact that
the vendor believed in it enough to run its own business on it –- sort
of like eating your own dog food.