eBay 2004 Annual Report Download - page 13

comprehensive search engine with the titles and descriptions of items, as well as pricing and bidding updates
for active items. The platform also updates the seller's billing account every time an item is listed, a feature is
selected, or an auction closes with a bid in excess of the seller-speciÑed minimum bid. The platform sends
electronic invoices to all sellers at least monthly. In addition to these features, the eBay service supports a
community bulletin board and chat areas where users and eBay customer support personnel can interact.
Overall system volume on the eBay platform is signiÑcant, with peak usage in 2004 of approximately
890 million page views per day and 7.7 gigabits of outbound data traÇc per second.
Our eBay platform is designed around industry standard architectures to reduce downtime in the event of
outages or catastrophic occurrences. eBay seeks to provide availability 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Substantially all of our system hardware is hosted at Cable & Wireless and Qwest facilities in San Jose,
California, an eBay-owned data center in Denver, Colorado, and a Sprint Communications facility in
Sacramento, California. Each of these facilities provides redundant communications lines and emergency
power backup. Although our systems have been designed around industry-standard architecture to reduce
downtime in the event of outages or catastrophic occurrences, they remain vulnerable to damage or
interruption, and we do not maintain fully redundant systems. For more information regarding these risks, see
the information in Item 7 under ""Risk Factors That May AÅect Results of Operations and Financial
Condition Ì System failures could harm our business.''
Our eBay platform consists of Sun database servers running Oracle relational database management
applications with a mix of Sun and Hitachi storage devices, along with a suite of Pentium-based Internet
servers running the Windows NT and Linux operating systems. We use F5 Networks' load balancing systems
and our own redundant servers along with select software from Veritas to provide for fault tolerance, and we
use IBM's WebSphere application server for certain platform functions. In 2004 we completed the
implementation of a new billing and collections system from CSG Systems. We must continually improve our
systems to accommodate the increasing levels of use of our websites. In addition, we may need to develop or
license additional technology in order to add new features and functionality to our services. If we are unable to
upgrade or eÅectively integrate our technology, transaction processing systems, security infrastructure, or
network infrastructure to accommodate increased traÇc or transaction volume our business could be harmed.
For more information regarding these risks, see the information in Item 7 under ""Risk Factors That May
AÅect Results of Operations and Financial Condition Ì Our failure to manage growth could harm our
business.''
Our competitive space is characterized by rapidly changing technology, evolving industry standards,
frequent new service and product announcements, introductions and enhancements and changing customer
demands. Accordingly, our future success will depend on our ability to adapt to rapidly changing technologies,
to adapt our services to evolving industry standards and to improve the performance, features and reliability of
our services in response to competitive services and product oÅerings and evolving demands of the Internet.
Also, due to the potential growth in our customer base and number of listings, we anticipate that expansion
will be required. If we fail to adapt to any of these changes and to our anticipated growth, our business would
be harmed. In addition, the widespread adoption of new Internet, networking or telecommunications
technologies or other technological changes could require substantial expenditures to modify or adapt our
services or infrastructure. In 2004, we completed our migration to a new software architecture intended to
facilitate continued stability, improved scalability, and enhanced eÇciency on the eBay Marketplace. The new
architecture now serves nearly 100% of the site traÇc of the eBay Marketplace.
PayPal Platform
Our PayPal technology is designed to assure user access to the PayPal website. We focus much of
PayPal's development eÅorts on creating specialized software that enhances its Internet-based customer
functionality. One of PayPal's key challenges remains building and maintaining a scalable and reliable system,
capable of handling traÇc and transactions for a growing customer base. Most major components of our
PayPal network reside at our facilities in San Jose, California, at an eBay-owned data center in Denver,
Colorado, at an Equinix data center in San Jose, California, and at our PayPal operations and customer
support facility in Omaha, Nebraska.
11