Hyderabad development centre to work on redoing payment and vendor platforms.
Online retailing giant Amazon.com is looking to India, as it revamps its web services architecture to meet surging traffic volumes.
Seattle-based Amazon is ramping up its key e-Commerce Platform Group (eCPG) at the company's Hyderabad development centre, as part of plans to build next-generation platform services. Sources said the group was looking at variegating its web services architecture in keeping with increasing traffic on its book retailing and e-book payment platforms.
“Amazon is looking at building new features and systems that will need to scale in tandem with the huge volumes that its critical systems will go through in the coming years," sources said.
e-CPG is expected to define a layered Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to tightly integrate a growing buyer base with Amazon's widespread network of vendors and security services providers. It will develop core service Application Program Interfaces (APIs), aggregated APIs, web applets, data models and policy control that fit into Amazon's modified web services architecture.
“The technical leadership team in Amazon India has been getting to work on more high-end payment systems and is set to grow in prominence. The Indian team has been prominent in designing cutting-edge payment systems for Amazon and the next step for the company is to create a top line-up of technical leaders out of India," sources said.
e-CPG is expected to work on new architectural and design choices, invent new features, develop distributed services and build a massively scalable and stable platform solution on various UNIX-based platforms, sources said. Amazon expects this SOA-based architecture to hold up to the challenge of high volumes.
Amazon reportedly has over 420,000 titles on its virtual bookshelves. Amazon India officials could not be accessed for comment on their India plans.
The retailer has been looking at building next-generation platform services for its ordering and vendor payment systems, under strain in recent times due to the exponential increase in traffic, spawned partly by the launch of popular e-book reader Kindle.
On January 21, Amazon had announced the coming release of its Kindle Development Kit (KDK), which will allow developers to build active content for the Kindle. A beta version was announced, with a February 2010 release date. A number of companies have already experimented with delivering active content through Kindle's bundled browser, and the KDK is likely to evolve into a new revenue-sharing model for developers.
Amazon also launched a Digital Text Platform for authors recently, which would allow them to upload and sell their books directly to Kindle owners worldwide. The Kindle Digital Text Platform will allow those writing in English, German or French to self-publish books on Kindle. The authors are expected to receive 35 per cent of revenues based on their list price, regardless of discounts by Amazon.
“KDK and the Digital Text Platform are expected to triple the current traffic on Amazon's payment platforms. The e-Commerce Platform Group is expected to design a services architecture which will feature new data management models and better vendor aggregation for Amazon," sources added.
