Technology changes   In-house work   Pet technology   projects   Keeping the   bloom on   The smell of success

Business is blooming at FTD.com. The online floral and gift retailer went public in September 1999 and became profitable a year later. Since then, FTD.com has posted six-consecutive quarters of profitability. Naturally, this means that orders are blossoming, to 2 million in fiscal 2001, which ended June 30, from 1.6 million in 2000. FTD.com CIO Fred Johnson attributes success to the popular FTD brand, the trusty mainframe-based Mercury Network that links 50,000 florists worldwide; an open corporate culture and superb e-commerce technology. He shares his thoughts in an interview with Network World Signature Series Editor Beth Schultz.

How has technology changed at FTD.com since becoming a public company?
The changes are focused on what serves the customers. For example, we added [about six months ago] a shopping cart and features that allow them to make multiple purchases in an organized manner and to send those products to other people. In more of a process change, we've gone from the concept of having a major release of the site once a year to new releases every four to 10 weeks. So we have a constant process of getting our best ideas into the site.

How has this process change affected site development?
Prior to '99, the rate of change was slower, the sales volume lower, etc. So the idea of updating the site once a year was fairly acceptable. The last major release back in that era added personal accounts and a reminder service, and changed the look of the pages. Those kinds of features could wait a year to get from drawing board into the site. After '99, the pace quickened: [We changed] the look, with tags and Quick Shop, [added] different color schemes, different ways to do searches, and we've done a lot of things for some of our co-partners [such as United Airlines]. Underneath all that, we have made technological changes that have let us scale from the volumes we used to run prior to '99 to the kinds of volumes we run today.

What are some of those technological changes?
The biggest one is the addition of front-end caching for static and dynamic images, both at the site and out in the Internet where it's closer to the user. Caching gives us two benefits. One is for what customers want: speed. They don't want to wait for Internet pages, and we very much respect our customers' time. And second, it decreases the number of page-assembly servers we need. That has a cascading effect to help us run the site more efficiently but, more important, saves us on testing time, lets us put other changes in faster - that type of thing.
Then another very big infrastructure change is the addition of database management software on the back end of the site for dealing with personal accounts, for managing the shopping cart, for inventory control management.
Other changes are the adding of raw bandwidth throughout the site and a lot more redundancy in the routers.

Do you handle these types of changes in-house?
We use a combination of in-house and outsourcing. Our major partner, Novator Systems in Toronto . . . does the site development to our specifications. And, our servers reside in collocation sites. The primary site is at Exodus [Communications] in Jersey City, N.J., and the back-up site is at Q9 [Networks] in Toronto. We use collocation facilities because of their connectivity and peering relationships into the Internet.

And what technology, besides the caching, do you use in the e-commerce infrastructure?
We've got five other major types of technology. The application server is Apache. The application language is Perl. The database management systems are from Sybase. The routers are from Cisco. The load balancer is from F5 [Networks].

Handling holiday volume that can increase 40 times that of a normal day must be quite a challenge. How do you deal with that?
We used to engineer to the edge - if this thing is going to go 60 miles per hour, we're going to build a car that can go somewhere between 59.5 miles per hour and 60.5 miles per hour. So it was always really tough to get through the holidays. We now build to two times the marketing forecast, and we do that because we have to allow error in our measurement and scalability - and sometimes marketing gets a lot more sales then it tells us it's going to get.

Do you have any pet technology projects?
It's sort of like my having five sons - I can't name a favorite. We try to build an IT culture where if somebody has a 20-minute improvement that has a big benefit to the customer and the business, we want to celebrate that more than the fact that we make it possible to place wireless phone orders on FTD.com. That was pretty leading edge when we did it a year or two ago, but I don't rate that as more fun. I'm a systemic person. I take a lot of pride when we get all the engines running right and the business moving forward.

What do you consider your biggest accomplishments at FTD.com?
Making FTD.com a profitable business inside a year - that is the overriding thing that I take pride in. But I'm also proud of our technological evolution and the fact that most orders will go to a floral designer without being touched by a human.

Related links

Contact Signature Series Editor Beth Schultz

Keeping the bloom on
FTD.com CIO Fred Johnson notes these details of the online floral site's operations.

The smell of success
FTD.com's CIO talks about the technology behind this wildly growing (and profitable) site.

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