IDG News Service - Raymie Stata, named Thursday as Yahoo chief technology officer, has a tough job ahead of him: Yahoo has experienced flagging user interest of late and although it started as a search company, it has since farmed out that area to Microsoft Bing, repositioning itself as an online content and service provider.
Stata had been the consumer Web portal's chief architect. He replaces former CTO Farzad Nazem, who stepped down in April.
At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York last week, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz downplayed the importance of search, calling it a commodity. Instead, Yahoo plans to remain relevant by personalizing the user experience around search and its other services, making the experience one that can't be so easily duplicated.
The key to offering personalization is standardizing Yahoo's IT infrastructure, Stata told the IDG News Service in an interview during TechCrunch. While Stata was still chief architect at the time of the interview, he had a clear idea of technological direction of the company, and how a private cloud-based approach could serve Bartz's vision of the infinitely mutable Yahoo Web pages.
The company is about halfway finished on its plan of standardizing its architecture, he explained. Following a road map that it put in place three years ago, the company is organizing its IT operations into four layers: The first layer is the physical, the servers and equipment in the data center. The second layer is infrastructure fabric -- the basic set of software that all Yahoo products will use, such as authentication and application servers.
Stata sees this second layer as the company's "cloud" layer. By abstracting the software infrastructure as a cloud, Yahoo can ensure the reliability of the services that it offers, since resources can be pooled and moved around on an as-needed basis.
The third layer is the specific platforms that the applications run upon -- the Web, mobile phones, iPads and so forth. The fourth and final layer is the applications themselves.
The project of boiling down all of Yahoo's IT assets into a single cloud entity has been a major undertaking, Stata admitted. For instance, serving up a single copy of a Yahoo home page once required drawing from 33 different code bases. As of December 2009, that number has been reduced to one.
Over the long haul, this standardization and separation of duties should make it easy for the company to customize the look and feel, as well as the content chosen, for each individual user. The company can develop novel ways of sussing out what users want, and then applying it across all the company's offerings.
Free Insider GuideCopyright © 1994 - 2012 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Computerworld Inc. is prohibited. Computerworld and Computerworld.com and the respective logos are trademarks of International Data Group Inc.
