e-business on demand
eBay supports growing online
marketplace with reliable,
on demand services.
Overview
 The Challenge
Support fast growth and
skyrocketing user traffic as The
World’s Online Marketplace
 Why On Demand?
To automate operational
processes, helping the company
maximize service reliability,
accelerate time to market for
delivery of new services and
reduce costs
 Solution
An automated, integrated business
management solution that helps
the company dynamically adjust to
changing business requirements,
When demand changes by the
strengthens reliability and
second, flexibility takes on a whole
resiliency of services, and
new meaning.
effectively optimizes resources
 Key Benefits
That’s why at eBay, The World’s
Greater efficiency in new service
Online Marketplace ®, creating a
rollouts; accelerated new service
dynamic business environment that
development; reduced application
can predict and adjust to demand
downtime caused by rollouts;
quickly and seamlessly has been
maintained high levels of service
key to its enormous success.
during rapid growth — without
substantial staffing increases
“The IBM on demand
automation blueprint
will help us move to
full-auto and gain
new levels of resiliency,
efficiency, responsiveness and flexibility.”
–Mark Hydar, manager, Enterprise
Management Systems, eBay
Automation drives flexibility, resiliency and efficiency
On Demand Benefits
The company serves more than 104 million registered members from around the
world with one new member joining nearly every second. More than US$23 billion
• Automation of application distribution
process drives greater efficiency
in new service rollouts, reduction
in new service development and
reduction in application downtime
during rollouts, enabling eBay to
flexibly and dynamically respond
to changing business conditions
in goods and services changed hands through eBay in 2003. And 430,000 small
• Autonomic, business service
management approach helps
company cost-effectively maintain
high service levels with existing staff
Because eBay transactions are conducted worldwide, 24 hours a day, seven
• Open environment provides
integrated, end-to-end view of service
delivery to help ensure a satisfying
user experience
customer demand.
• Rapid time to value achieved through
best practices
businesses in the U.S. have opened storefronts on eBay.
To achieve this success, eBay has focused on being first to market with new
services, responding quickly to user requirements and providing a highly reliable
platform through which to conduct business.
days a week, buyers must be able to locate, view and bid on items whenever they
want. Never knowing what a seller may list and how much interest there may be,
eBay needs to dynamically adjust its services to support rapidly changing
With the increasing size of eBay’s operations, executives estimated that it would
begin to take longer to launch new services and ensure the consistency, reliability
and availability of the eBay Web site if the company didn’t automate and streamline service delivery and management processes.
Executives forecasted that it would take a sizeable increase in staff and a significant increase in expenses to meet the company’s goals. eBay needed an efficient
way to continue to provide the response and availability that buyers and sellers
had come to expect without increasing its headcount and costs considerably.
“eBay is an on demand company,” explains Mark Hydar, manager of Enterprise
Management Systems for eBay. “Our customers are accustomed to us responding immediately to their needs. However, we need to do this in a smart and
cost-efficient way.”
2
Automating processes for greater efficiency
To manage these challenges, the company has implemented an integrated
Key Components
business service management solution that automates monitoring of the operat-
Software
ing environment, identifies issues that could cause service problems and
• IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager
leverages autonomic, self-healing capabilities to recover from service issues
• IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager
automatically. The solution also enables staff to identify spikes in interest for a
specific item or category and dynamically adjust its system resources to support
the increased usage. The company can replicate changes across its Web site
• IBM Tivoli Data Warehouse
• IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console ®
quickly and consistently so that new services and features are available faster.
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring
Additionally, the company enhanced its trading platform to strengthen delivery
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction
Performance
of real-time services in all regions and shorten the development time for trading
• IBM Tivoli NetView ®
enhancements. By creating a scalable, resilient operating environment eBay
can maximize service performance, accelerate time to market and boost
• IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor
• IBM WebSphere Application Server
Advanced Edition
user satisfaction.
IBM technology is at the core of these automated processes. A full suite of IBM
Tivoli solutions provide the tools necessary to enable eBay to focus on its core
®
• IBM WebSphere Studio Application
Developer
business — delivering new features and functionality to users while ensuring the
Servers
reliability of its service. IBM WebSphere Application Server Advanced Edition
• IBM ^ xSeries
®
software, combined with IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer technology, provides an open, standards-based platform that enables staff to more
quickly create and add new Web site features. IBM ^® xSeries ® systems
provide a resilient, high-performance foundation to power eBay’s site.
IBM services and Tivoli best practices helped eBay deploy its new business
service management solution in under six months. In fact, the company automated system-level monitoring across all its platforms — Microsoft ® Windows ®,
Sun Solaris and Linux — in just 60 days. IBM Software Services for WebSphere
also supported the implementation of IBM solutions. “We received help from
every corner of IBM,” explains Hydar. “IBM is responsive to our needs and
provides us with the support we need to be successful.”
3
Services
• IBM Global Services
• IBM Software Services for WebSphere
Automation drives flexibility, resiliency and efficiency
Rapidly and cost-effectively adjusting to business opportunities
Hydar emphasizes that the company can make and implement service enhancements faster and dynamically adjust its infrastructure based on customer demand
thanks to Tivoli software. For example, the company has realized greater efficiency
in new service rollouts and a major reduction in the building of new services with
IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager software automating distribution of new application features to multiple systems simultaneously. Likewise, Tivoli Configuration
Manager software has helped reduce application downtime, cutting the time it
takes to remove and reactivate a system from 20 minutes to just 4 minutes.
As a result, new services and trading features are quickly available to users, and
staff can reconfigure systems on the fly to add the necessary processing power,
so users don’t experience a service slowdown if demand spikes for a hot item.
Case in point: activation of its next generation search engine, which needed to be
deployed across over 70 systems, took less than 10 minutes, and deployment of
new antivirus software updates to more than 2,800 services took less than 30
minutes. “Tivoli software helps us flexibly address changing business conditions.
If we see an opportunity or our community asks for a change, we can be
extremely responsive,” says Hydar.
According to Hydar, Tivoli software is also crucial in helping the company costeffectively maintain high service levels — despite the fact that the number of
systems under management more than doubled in one year. “Our environment is
constantly changing. New systems are put into service on a regular basis. With
Tivoli software, we have maximized our availability and productivity levels with
minimal interruptions,” says Hydar.
4
A complete solution
Tivoli solutions provide eBay with an end-to-end management service that
automates the monitoring and resolution of service issues, correlates operational
data to pinpoint the cause of problems and provides a business view of the eBay
infrastructure so staff can immediately determine the business impact of any
issue. Here’s how it works:
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring software helps track system performance, automates
recovery processes if a system is operating outside of target performance
levels and places data into an IBM Tivoli Data Warehouse system. Staff can
then review historical performance data to determine if an event is an isolated
problem or signifies a developing trend that will require further action. The
capacity planning team can also use this data to analyze service performance
over time and identify ways to optimize the environment and forecast evolving
business needs.
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance software conducts synthetic
transactions at two and a half minute intervals to measure performance of specific processes from an end-user perspective, such as how long it takes for
each page to load. The staff has set business rules that automate alerts when
the load time for each page falls outside its specified range. The system separates each process into individual steps and can quickly identify the cause of
a slowdown so corrective action can be taken.
• IBM Tivoli NetView ® software identifies and isolates network problems and
automates discovery of new devices. As the staff moves functionality from one
server to another to support capacity demands, Tivoli NetView software registers the change, enabling the system to be automatically monitored as part of
the appropriate business view.
5
Automation drives flexibility, resiliency and efficiency
• Tivoli Configuration Manager software scans systems daily to help ensure that
system parameters, operating systems and middleware software are consistent from system to system. This is critical to avoid performance issues and
keep other operational problems from cropping up as systems are reassigned
from one line of business to another based on user demand.
• Data from these and more than 50 other sources, including third-party providers, is fed into IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console ® software, which correlates
the information to identify the root cause of the problem and then automates
resolution of many common problems, such as restarting a server once memory
capacity reaches a specific level. Because Tivoli Enterprise Console software
provides a single, integrated view, eBay can monitor service availability from virtually all angles — the last mile, the middle mile and inside its infrastructure — and
then work with other organizations to flag issues that may affect eBay users.
• IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager software provides staff with a single
logical view of eBay.com in terms of critical business systems that helps the
IT staff prioritize actions to support the most important business systems first.
Tivoli Business Systems Manager software graphically monitors the interconnected elements that support each line of business, indicating if the Web site
or a particular service on the site is down and why. Additionally, Tivoli Business
Systems Manager software provides the capacity planning team with the
information needed to model “what if” scenarios for each line of business. By
doing so, the team can effectively evaluate resource requirements to help the
company scale for seasonal demands and other business variables.
• IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor software alerts staff when demand for an item
or category is growing faster than projected. It provides staff with historical
intelligence to separate reoccurring events from what the company refers to
as a “crazy Ivan,” a sudden spike in demand for an item sparked by an event
or news report. “We don’t know when someone is going to write something in
the Wall Street Journal that’s going to trigger a crazy Ivan,” says Hydar. “Tivoli
software solutions help us automatically identify changing demand and adjust
our resources accordingly.”
6
Next step: full-auto ahead
Popularity of eBay continues to grow. Revenue has climbed dramatically and
continues to rise. As the company grows, Hydar plans to expand his use of IBM
solutions to achieve what he calls “full-auto,” a move from automating individual
processes to end-to-end enterprise-wide automation that optimizes service
delivery and provides the highest levels of service in the most efficient manner.
With IBM on demand solutions, eBay can orchestrate provisioning using
business policies so that its entire infrastructure can respond dynamically to
changing conditions.
“The IBM on demand automation blueprint will help us move to full-auto and gain
new levels of resiliency, efficiency, responsiveness and flexibility,” says Hydar.
For more information
Please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner.
Visit us at:
ibm.com /tivoli
7
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2004
IBM Global Services
Route 100
Somers, NY 10589
U.S.A.
Produced in the United States of America
06-04
All Rights Reserved
The e-business logo, e-business on demand,
the e(logo) business on demand lockup, ^,
IBM, the IBM logo, NetView, Tivoli, Tivoli Enterprise
Console, WebSphere and xSeries are trademarks
of International Business Machines Corporation in
the United States, other countries or both.
Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of
Microsoft Corporation in the United States,
other countries or both.
The World’s Online Marketplace is a registered
trademark of eBay.
Other company, product and service names may
be trademarks or service marks of others.
This case study is an example of how one customer uses IBM products. There is no guarantee
of comparable results.
References in this publication to IBM products
and services do not imply that IBM intends
to make them available in all countries in which
IBM operates.
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