While most people go to Amazon.com and see a slick e-commerce site, entrepreneur Dave Cotter sees a treasure trove of data--and a way to make money.
Cotter left enterprise software company BEA Systems two years ago to explore the idea of building a new company on the shoulders of programmable Web sites.
Along with Greg Harrison, he co-founded Mpire, which allows people to buy and sell goods online by tapping into the sales channels of sites such as Amazon.com, eBay.com, Craigslist and others. It also analyzes data on buying patterns to uncover the optimal purchase price.
As more software applications go online, a race is on among Web service providers to lure software developers at companies like Mpire. An active "ecosystem," or network, of partners creating linked services improves a hosting company's health, as third-party products drive traffic--and revenue--to the hosting site.
"In the enterprise world, you had Microsoft's developer program competing with those from BEA, IBM or Oracle," said Cotter, who is chief marketing officer at Mpire. "What we are starting to see is the major Internet service providers, or platforms, going after hot start-ups to get them to develop things that highlight their platform."
Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of the online retail giant, last week started a beta program for a service that lets developers tap into the processing power at Amazon's data centers.
Called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it works with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and other services, such as messaging, search and e-commerce. Each is offered through application programming interfaces (APIs)--a set of instructions for accessing services programmatically.
The utility computing-like EC2 service places Amazon in competition with the likes of hardware vendors IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, which each offer pay-as-you-go hosted processing.
Amazon's expanding developer program--which now has 180,000 registered members--is also vying for programmers who have traditionally served on-premise software providers.
But rather than hooking programmers into a specific operating system or database, Amazon and other Web heavyweights make their computing infrastructure the "platform" to run third-party hosted applications.
Taking a cue from Microsoft, established Web companies like Google, Yahoo and eBay have developer programs that mimic successful Microsoft programs or open-source projects. Programmers can get documentation, free tools, code samples, and the like.
"Any platform that competes with developer attention is in some way competition. Developer mind-share is precious because there are only so many developers out there," said Greg Isaacs, head of the eBay Developers Program, who said the company continues to expose more of its core Web site to outsiders. "The beauty of it is that we've become an operating system for ecommerce."
eBay tries to lure developers monetarily by sharing revenue with online vendors that sell through their commerce sites. And then, of course, there's the "coolness factor" of getting to play with cutting-edge technology, said Isaacs.
Let a thousand flowers bloomFor newer, "Web 2.0" companies, providing APIs to allow third parties to "mash up" data from multiple sources is becoming commonplace.
Amazon, however, is offering more than just programmatic access to its product catalog. The e-commerce giant boasts one of the most battle-tested computing infrastructures on the Internet, which it is opening up to outsiders.
"A fundamental premise behind what we are trying to do at Amazon Web Services is provide external developers all the benefits of scale that Amazon enjoys as a large Web site and large econsumer and producer of Web infrastructure," said Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations at Amazon Web Services.
Rather than contract with a hosting company, buy hardware and hire staff, a customer could tap Amazon for computing power, storage and other general-purpose computing services.
Selipsky argued that outsiders can tap into the performance, reliability and security that the engineers of Amazon.com created over the years, which includes a total technology investment of more than US$1.5 billion.
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