At that point, eBay decided it needed to make major changes in its approach to Web server configuration. Many of eBay's original technology staff had backgrounds at Oracle, a company that has a tradition of selling large databases that run on equally large servers. Further, the nature of eBay's business any visitor might want to view information about any auction at any time led eBay management initially to implement a centralized architecture with one large database residing on a few large database server computers. It also made sense to use similar hardware to serve the Web pages generated from that database.