Amazon.com is probably the most well known proponent of the web services model. It all started with 'ZShops', a facility that allowed customers to set up online stores to resell second-hand books, for example. The initial principle was simple: provide Amazon as an e-commerce platform, allowing customers to trade books among themselves. ZShops has grown to where it now enables businesses to set up their own online presence within the broader Amazon marketplace, which operates as an extension of Amazon itself.

In practical terms, what Amazon did was to offer access to its commerce engine via a rapid application development (RAD) environment. This has allowed an entire range of businesses to build, test and deploy e-commerce applications on the tried-and-tested Amazon infrastructure, with minimal upfront investment and maintenance costs.

Initially targeted at small businesses, those services have now grown into enterprise-grade open toolkits for enabling end-user content generation and the development and rollout of enterprise architecture using RAD tools supplied by Amazon. This has all been made possible through web services. It is essentially Amazon offering internet-based access to the applications originally built for internal use. And it's worth investigating too. Go to amazon.com, click on the Amazon web services link on the left-hand side about halfway down the page. Among other things, this link provides a catalogue of the services available as well as a number of success stories.