What Happened?

About the Company

Amazon strives to be Earth`s most customer-centric company where people can find and discover virtually anything they want to buy online. By giving customers more of what they want - low prices, vast selection, and convenience - Amazon continues to grow and evolve as a world-class e-commerce platform. Founded by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com website started in 1995 as a place to buy books because of the unique customer experience the Web could offer book lovers. Bezos believed that only the Internet could offer customers the convenience of browsing a selection of millions of book titles in a single sitting. During the first 30 days of business, Amazon fulfilled orders for customers in 50 states and 45 countries - all shipped from his Seattle-area garage. Amazon`s evolution from Web site to e-commerce partner to development platform is driven by the spirit of innovation that is part of the company`s DNA. The world`s brightest technology minds come to Amazon.com to research and develop technology that improves the lives of shoppers and sellers around the world.

About the Person

Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a researcher at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He has held positions of Research Engineer, VP of Technology and CTO in companies that handled the transition of academic technology into industry. Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles for journals and conferences, most of them on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.