The smell of success
FTD.com's CIO talks about the technology behind this wildly growing (and profitable) site.
By
Beth Schultz
Network
World, 02/18/02
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Back to Flower power
On the relationship between FTD.com
and FTD's famous Mercury Network
The Mercury Network connects 50,000 florists worldwide, and
we fill orders through those florists. Should FTD decide to
update or change the Mercury Network, we do have input, with
the understanding that that network is run for the benefit
of the 50,000 florists and their businesses. · [Failures]
are not allowed on the Mercury Network - it goes back to the
FTD name and its protection, and the Mercury man and what
he stands for. Our central environment is completely redundant,
and there is no single point of failure allowed in the Mercury
Network. That was vital to FTD before FTD.com, and now it's
vital to both businesses.
On use of freeware at the core of such
a heavily trafficked site
Our use of the [Apache Web server and Perl programming language]
goes back to order No. 1 in 1994. We started developing this
site as a custom effort, and we have had no problem growing
with these technologies.
On scalability
Hardware is not the biggest issue. To get to scalability,
you have to have processes that are predictable, and hopefully
linear, as volume grows. So we constantly measure the key
processes [on every application] for resource consumption.
We know how to scale them, taking predicted volumes, doubling
that, and then engineering all the hardware, bandwidth and
such to get to those goals. What you don't want is something
you think is the size of a grain of pepper turn out to be
the size of a grain of salt because when you get to the 40-times
number that difference is amplified to a degree that you can't
deal with.
On mobile commerce and
other technologies to watch
We were an early adopter with wireless, but we're holding
back on further investment until we see more adoption. The
same goes for PDAs. We just love the way it looks like PDAs
should help our customers work with us, and we've done distribution
of reminders and marketing messages through some of our partners
to PDA devices. But we're not really out there yet. The limitations
of screen size and such still makes true adoption tough.
Broadband [Internet access] is a big deal for us because having things like screen savers and cursor chasers is easier with broadband. And we're watching voice technology, for voice commands. Voice has been a technology that's always been almost there, and we'd love for it to arrive.
On FTD.com's corporate culture
The executive team members, No. 1, have clear accountabilities.
We really know what each other is supposed to do and we work
together - all the way from defining our strategy, which we
review at least annually; to developing our operating plan
for the next year, which we review monthly to make sure it
is fresh for the rest of the year; down to managing projects.
There are no surprises; the candor is refreshing. · If there's
a difference between FTD.com and other businesses, it's the
degree to which we've brought the culture to one of candor
and teamwork. That's an aspiration of any business, and we're
very, very good at it.
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.
Related links
Contact Signature Series Editor
Beth Schultz
Flower power
FTD.com CIO Fred Johnson describes building one of the nation's most profitable e-comm sites.
Keeping the bloom on
FTD.com CIO Fred Johnson notes these details of the online floral site's operations.
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