October 4th, 2007
CIO Sessions: 1-800 Flowers blossoms with new technologies
In a CIO Vision Series interview, Steve Bozzo, CIO of 1-800 Flowers talks with me about what it takes to run the company’s daily IT operations, across a network of more than 9,000 florists.
Today, about 75 percent of 1-800 Flowers transactions are Internet-based, Bozzo said, and the user experience is a key factor. “Making the user experience very, very elegant and pleasant for our customers, we’re always looking for that, that’s absolutely paramount in our minds. The company is also exploring Web 2.0 technologies.
The company has built infrastructure to scale up for the few extraordinary days of peak usage during the year. “We need to build our infrastructure to manage the peaks obviously, and then the rest of the year we have that excess capacity. So basically what we do is scale the environment horizontally in three hosting centers around the country,” Bozzo said. “When we don’t need the environment for the peaks, we expand our development environment and start virtualizing so we’re tapping into those resources more and more.”
- Air Force Reserve
- Alcatel-Lucent
- American Red Cross
- BAE Systems
- Boeing
- British Airways
- Campbell Arnott’s
- Charles Schwab
- Churchill Downs
- CIO Panel
- City of Philadelphia
- City of San Francisco
- First Group
- Harrah’s Entertainment
- Harvard Medical School
- Hilton Hotels
- Jetstar
- McKesson
- Millennium Hotels
- Motorola
- Oxfam GB
- Qualcomm
- Reuters
- SF Giants
- SFO
- SurfControl
- Travelocity
- UNICEF
- UC Berkeley
- Vanguard
- Virgin Entertainment Group
- Virgin UK
- Vodafone
- Webcor Builders
- William Hill
- Wotif
- Yahoo!
- Yili Group
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
