1-800-FLOWERS.COM Client Reference Video

Video Transcript

1-800-FLOWERS.COM: when you hear the name you understand right away what we do. We’re your florist and you can come in through your web browsers, telephone, mobile device - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Customers seem to change every day. I think it’s the expectation set that’s changed which is driven by the technology change.

Our job is to be a florist, to help you to express yourself and connect to the important people in your life every day. You don’t want to know about the kinds of computers we use or what networks. You just want to know it works perfectly every time.

We try and maintain the flexibility of a small entrepreneurial company; at the same time we’re getting a little bit bigger and it’s a little harder to make those changes on the fly.

Knowing that life is changing quickly … it seems to be going faster and faster, we’d better have a platform that allows us to be nimble. So we have built in the flexibility that we can.

It became clear …over the last year or so, that we’re good at being florists. And we’re not good at being a technology company. We happen to be a florist that embraces technology but we’re not a technology company.

So our decision was let’s do what we do best, service our customers, find innovative products, innovative services, engage with out customers and let’s find the right partner who we trust who will help us to become the company we want to be. So that we can do what? Help our customers express themselves and connect to the important people in their lives and never ever worry about what’s in the backroom, how many computers they have.

We have Rational tools and Global Business Systems consulting which helped us to figure out, okay, here’s where you are today, here’s where you need to do, you’re becoming more and more global, you have these 10,000 flower shops we need to connect together.

We use the IBM Webshere Commerce which is the basic platform we’re on. We’re on the Webshere Message Broker which helps us in all those communication things we need to do with our customers: "We have your order, it’s on it’s way, it’s been delivered."

We have the P-series hardware which is the guts of what we do. You put the wonderful software on but you have to have good, reliable, scalable technology capabilities on the hardware side because we’re a company that does 14 million transactions a year we have one level of business in January and then there’s this thing in February called Valentine’s Day which makes our business go up 10 or 20X. So you have to have scalability. So the P-series hardware helps us to do that.

We’ve been very fortunate to build an internationally known brand. Part of the responsibility of shepherding a brand like that, like 1-800-FLOWERS.COM has become is to make sure that our customers have peace of mind. And the peace of mind is that anything that they do with us transactionally or even informationally is secure and always will be. By moving to this IBM WebSphere platform, we feel good that not only do we have the best suite of security safety devices today, but that we’ll have the still next year.

We have the partnership with IBM that allows us to take our innovation and our ideas for innovation and have all of our bandwidth and resources available fort that innovation -- not for building a platform, not for building the right set of service in the right configuration, not for building the data centers around the world that we need to maintain that secure customer information. They do that and now we can turn our resources to doing the innovative things.

They’re not florists, we are. Our job is to be florists and allow them to be our technology partner.

We’ve built this platform with IBM so that we can predict it so that we, what? Never disappoint you, tell you exactly what the story is and be able to respond to those changes and needs so that [SNAPS FINGERS] magic happens.