HAI WANG
2008
IT MANAGER OF THE YEAR
IT manager uses Oracle grid technology to
manage data and support treasure seekers.
Although Hai Wang’s official job is director of data platforms for
China’s Taobao.com, his real job is to enable Taobao.com’s users
to buy and sell “treasure.”
Taobao.com, whose motto is that there is no treasure
that cannot be found and no treasure that cannot be sold, is
the largest consumer-to-consumer auction and business-to-consumer e-commerce Web site in China. With more than 62
million registered members, market share of 70 to 80 percent,
and transaction turnover of US$6.2 billion for 2007, buying and
selling treasure is big business for Taobao.com.
Facilitating the buying and selling of treasure also translates
into the need to manage huge amounts of data effectively.
Wang, Oracle Magazine’s IT Manager of the Year, led the data
platforms team that designed and implemented the data warehouse and business intelligence platforms, based on an Oracle
grid stack including Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle
RAC), Oracle Automatic Storage Management (a feature of Oracle
Database), and Oracle Clusterware, that power the site.
“Our biggest challenge is managing hundreds of terabytes
of data,” says Wang. “On one hand, we need to ensure system
performance and stability, while on the other hand, we need to
be able to mine intelligence from the data.”
All of Taobao.com’s systems are built on a combination of
Java- and Oracle-based architecture, with the main data warehouse running on a 12-node Oracle RAC system.
With a huge number of registered users, transaction volume
already comparable to eBay, and annual growth of 50 percent,
scalability and high availability were important design criteria for
Wang and a key reason Taobao.com chose Oracle RAC for constructing its data warehouse solution.
Taobao.com is also using Oracle data warehouse technology
to offer personalized recommendations to every auction bidder,
as well as analysis tools to the sellers—features that help to
increase transaction volumes significantly as well as improve
customer retention.
Wang is an Oracle ACE and an active advisor on the Oracle
forum at www.itpub.net, the largest independent IT community
in China. He continues to sharpen and share his technical knowledge with others, and he believes that successful IT managers
need to work closely with business leaders.
“Today’s IT managers need to have a sharp business sense,
understand ROI [return on investment] analysis, communicate
using business language, and have strong technology innovation
capabilities,” says Wang. “But they also need business creativity.”
winnerSPECS
Name: Hai Wang
Job title/description: Director of
Data Platforms
Company: Taobao.com (an Alibaba
Group company)
Location: Hangzhou, China
Award: IT Manager of the Year 2008
