QUESTION:

Read the excerpt and answer ALL questions. Include the reference for all resources cited in your answer (if any). Save your answer in PDF format and submit the file by upload it here. In December 2016, ASOS an online fashion retailer, announced plans to double sales over the next 5 years. These ambitious goals are supported by a new e-commerce platform based on innovative microservices. Instead of updating its existing infrastructure, ASOS decided to completely redesign the foundation of its business to run on Microsoft Azure. We need a platform that would be flexible so that we could try new things in the presentation layer, in the way that consumers interact with us," says Bob Strudwick, Chief Technology Officer at ASOS. Currently, that means a mobile-first strategy, and in the future, it will mean conversational commerce and augmented reality." . The cloud platform provides automated resiliency across multiple Azure datacenters, with each service failing over independently as needed. Microsoft's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings meshed well with the fashion retailer's technology and business strategies. "We also bought heavily into the PaaS concept. We wanted to get the maximum amount of competitive advantage out of the team we'd assembled, and we didn't want to expend those resources on commodity functions like worrying about database backups and software patching. Instead, we wanted them to focus on designing and implementing high-quality software," says Strudwick. Back-end services such as searches, order processing, customer profiles, and inventory management are called by application programming interfaces (APIs) that communicate with separate, customer-facing applications running on websites and mobile devices. Because services operate independently, they can be deployed in any combination to diverse regions. ASOS can also easily tailor its front-end services without modifying back-end infrastructure. This flexibility enables greater personalization and supports the company's mobile-first strategy, which is crucial because more than 70% of website traffic now comes from mobile devices. The company recently launched natively running mobile apps for iOS and Android platforms that include a built-in recommendation engine, and the website will soon have a similar capability. "In a world where we have 85,000 products on the site and 5,000 products going live each week, we need to make sure that the right subset of those products is in front of our consumers," says Strudwick. The acceleration is due in large part to agile software development processes that take advantage of the Paas architecture. a. Evaluate ASOS by using Porter's Five Forces model. Identify the forces and in your evaluation, include the possible level for each force (high or low) and suggest to ASOS on how to control each force