Now ten years old, and with 975,000 independent vendors, Amazon.com is one of the classic long-tail online companies. Its new CTO, Werner Vogels, talks openly with Halley Suitt about the company, their policies for making data available to others (while protecting customers' privacy, and the state of search engines. Werner says that search is still in its infancy, but it's like dancing bears: the novelty alone makes it look pretty good.

Internally, Amazon.com is "organized chaos," deploying small teams to implement new systems. Externally, they've learned valuable lessons from the knowledge of their customers'reviews to build out a large-scale network of shared intelligence.

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Werner Vogels is Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com. His role there is to help develop technologies that increase the reliability and scalability of the organization's operation.

Before joining Amazon, Vogels was a research scientist at Cornell University, where he was a principal investigator in several projects researching the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He has also acted as VP of Technology and CTO in companies that have specialized in taking academic technology and applying it to industrial situations.

Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. In addition to being a regular speaker at technology conferences, he is the author of a large number of journal articles, the bulk of which have been on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

Resources:

• Werner's All Things Distributed Weblog

This program is from the Memory Lane series.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Sid Yadav
• Post-production audio engineer: Paul Figgiani