How did Webb add more than $2 billion to a company's market valuation before taking any action? Well, it may not have been Webb alone -- but his reputation as a seasoned, methodical technology infrastructure and operations expert certainly didn't hurt; he is just the type of taskmaster eBay needs. Webb built an integrated IT system that included enterprise resource planning and e-commerce capabilities for Bay Networks, and orchestrated a shift for disk-drive maker Quantum from a mainframe, closed system to a client-server architecture. Prior to his top tech position at eBay, Webb was chief information officer for PC maker Gateway, where he oversaw e-commerce and other Internet operations.

Webb is well aware of eBay's technology woes, and has plans to fix them. Rather than pointing the finger at hardware and application vendors such as Sun Microsystems or Oracle, though, the unassuming new technology chief hammers away at eBay's need to build out its back-end systems with the same vigor the company originally devoted to designing its front-end applications. It's a situation many Web companies, rushing to launch their own online services, may find uncomfortably familiar.

EBay has attributed its numerous outages this summer variously to hardware, software or network problems. What's going on?

We've had a number of low-level systems problems, no two of them the same. The front-end application itself, the stuff that's real brain surgery, is actually scaling very well and has lots of headroom. But we haven't implemented all of the operations excellence measures we need in the way of hardware redundancy and operational procedures. That has caused us some of the gotchas.

What types of redundancies and procedures are you talking about?

The two longest outages we've ever had, back in June, were tied to issues in the database server. To prevent that from happening again we've purchased another set of Sun Starfire E10000s, essentially replicating our production environment with another whole production environment. We are in what we call warm back-up state right now, where we can switch over to a second database if the main servers fail, and be operational again within a couple of hours. But we're still working toward a high-availability, fully fault-tolerant back-up, where the switch-over is almost instantaneous. That will be in place in the fourth quarter.

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