Be sure to read Proteus Part One and Proteus Part Two.
Last time I wrote about the eBay Commerce Engine pushing content and services from the eBay Inc. family. The value of the ecosystem grows further when you start inviting third party apps and services back in.

Here's the beauty...plug any of these apps or services once into The Cloud and EVERY eBay Inc. property plugged in has instant access.
eBay Motors starts offering CarFAX and Experian reports? Now so can Mobile.de, Bilbasen, and Marktplaats Autos (contracts pending, of course). Muze can now provide music catalog content for all eBay Classifieds media categories. UPS pickup and ship services are available for all Sellers no matter what eBay Inc. site you're on.
Don't need it? Don't use it. Simple.
Cloud Services can even help orchestrate long-latency service providers so you don't endanger each platform's SLA requirements. Asynchronous I/O makes The Cloud do all the work so each platform doesn't consume resources waiting for a response from the service provider.
--- P.S. Remember that "The Cloud" is my own poorly-chosen name for distributed computing that manages services federation and content syndication. Other low-level infrastructure components can also run in The Cloud so each eBay property can offload that work. Before you uber-Architects flay me for technical imprecision, I'm trying to explain this as simply as possible to my non-techie audience.
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