“…while the companies’ business strategies have a lot in
common, their attitudes about technology couldn’t be more
different. For one thing, Amway’s e-commerce spin-off,
Quixtar, is gung-ho on Microsoft technology and will build
its e-commerce project upon it. But Home Depot, a Windows NT
skeptic, thinks that strategy is nuts.
” ‘We wouldn’t even consider NT for this kind of volume,’ says
Mike Anderson, Home Depot’s vice president of IS in Atlanta.
Anderson is adamant: NT just isn’t scalable or reliable enough
for a high-volume e-commerce site, he says. …Home Depot expects
to be handling up to 2,700 customer transactions per second… Home
Depot’s choice for e-commerce is an onsite cluster of 21
Hewlett-Packard HP-UX servers.”
“As for the [Amway] Quixtar technology strategy, it’s the
opposite of Home Depot’s. ‘We have 50 NT servers, and maybe NT
isn’t perfect, but you can scale up,’ [the senior manager of
Amway’s Internet group, Randy] Bancino says. ‘We’re stress-testing
for 10,000 simultaneous users.’ “
“Microsoft… is the driving force behind getting the [Amway]
site together. Quixtar has 30 in-house staffers working on the site
with Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Fry Multimedia, which built MSN
Shopping for Microsoft. And that’s not all. ‘Microsoft people are
on site here every day for application development,’ Bancino
says.”
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