100 Smartest Companies: #13 eBay Portable apps propel online auctioneer

[Kristijntje]

How does eBay's information-technology staff juggle the company's constant acquisition sprees, surging network demand and more daily transactions than Nasdaq? The key is flexibility and scalability, according to James Barrese, eBay's vice president of systems development. "We not only have to innovate on a regular basis, we also have to innovate at scale," he says, meaning the company's systems and applications must expand and grow as needed. "With 180 million users and new acquisitions, we sometimes need to turn on a dime."

To enable this, developers at the online auctioneer, which ranked No. 13 on Baseline's list of the smartest companies, work with portable applications, based on what are called data abstraction layers that are not tied to any particular architecture. Abstraction layers allow developers to write applications for different platforms without having to know the details of the underlying technology—in this case, the type of database or data source...

full article: http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,15...475,00.asp

The full list of Baseline's 100 Smartest Companies is here: http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,15...521,00.asp

[xppman]

With 180 million users?

See what I mean?
These people lie so much.
The know they don't have 180 million users.
They have 180 million accounts and over half of them are not even active.

At every turn this company lies to the public.
They truly sound more and more like an Enron everyday.