Webinar | Target Modernizes Retail with Engaging Digital Experiences
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As consumers continue moving towards digital shopping channels to make purchases, online and mobile shopping has become a core component of any retail business strategy. Retail leader Target has modernized its brick and mortar business to embrace digital media to better engage with their online and mobile customers. Target has been aggressively building a robust API platform for the past 3 years. This has allowed Target to quickly test and learn new digital guest experiences and continue to be a leader in retail. During this 3 year journey, many new technologies have enabled the growth in this space including Apache Cassandra™ to enable scale and resiliency. Join the webinar with Heather Mickman, Target’s Senior Group Manager, and learn how Target delivers engaging customer experience with its digital strategy and why Cassandra was the chosen technology.
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Webinar | Target Modernizes Retail with Engaging Digital Experiences
- 1. Thank you for joining. We will begin shortly. Brick and Mortar Meets Digital – Target Modernizes Retail with Engaging Digital Experiences Heather Mickman Sr. Group Manager – Enterprise Services and Integration
- 2. All attendees placed on mute Input questions at any time using the online interface Webinar Housekeeping
- 4. EXPAND more stores, more technology 1,834
- 5. TECHNOLOGY FOOTPRINT a bit bigger than this guy’s https://flic.kr/p/gaYY1K
- 6. COMPLEXITY which gold gear did you say? https://flic.kr/p/KikA9
- 8. CHANGE HAPPENS things have changed https://flic.kr/p/827xtm https://flic.kr/p/6T6S1D http://bit.ly/1q47Fx8 http://bit.ly/1keBymw
- 9. MOVING, MOVING, MOVING things keep changing
- 10. EVOLVING MARKETPLACE brick and mortar meets digital http://bit.ly/W4w2O0
- 11. API making core assets easier to use https://flic.kr/p/nSzwY1
- 12. (R)EVOLUTIONARY creating new opportunities to delight https://flic.kr/p/nSzwY1 https://like2b.uy/target http://www.target.com
- 13. More options for Target Guests Shop online, pickup in store
- 15. Challenges And Barriers with Existing Tools
- 16. Barriers with Existing Tools • Cost • Process for traditional DBs was not a fit • Too few tools/vendors
- 17. Barriers with Existing Tools • RDBMS isn’t: – Distributed (Multi-Tenant) – Close to Guests (geographic distribution) – Distributed across our data centers – Distributed to the Cloud!
- 18. Barriers with Existing Tools • Lack of performance control – Process, not owning it all, flexibility on changes like indexing, etc. • Availability – Systems before had outages, downtime, etc. • Not Automate-able
- 20. Why Cassandra was attractive? • Fit 80% of our need • Years in development • Rich Cassandra dev. ecosystem • Google-able (open-source resources)
- 21. Why Cassandra was attractive? • Strong community • A company who would support it • Aligned well with existing investments • Simple pricing model
- 24. Cassandra The backbone of the Target API Automation Multi-Data Center Replication Linear, Predictable Scale
- 25. Ops Center Health checks made easy
- 26. SUCCESS if you got it, tell it 80 deployments per week <10 incidents per month monthly volumes 1.5+ billion 30+APIs
- 27. What’s Next?
- 29. Q/A Input questions at any time using the online interface
Editor's Notes
- Hi - I’m Heather Mickman. I lead the API program and Integration practice at Target. I’ve been with Target for 8 years and have been in technology for my almost 20 years! I actually started my career at Accenture in their supply chain practice in SF and then in Chicago, so its kind of fun to be at an event with them today with other IT leaders in the Twin Cities! I’m going to talk about the work we have done over the past few years to build and scale an enterprise API platform and APIs to enable creating digital experiences for Target. I’m not going to spend time on the technical implementation details – but will talk about the context of our need for APIs, the business drivers, and how we approached the solution and the keys to success for team to make this happen and what’s next in 2015 because its going to be a big year for us. I have the 2 folks that did the heavy lifting on our API platform with me today: Pete G and Danny. I’m going to leave plenty of time for questions at the end but also feel free to ask questions as I’m talking – always more fun to be interactive. So first, let me spend some time providing an overview of Target and our technology ecosystem. Then I will get into details on our API program.
- Target opened its first store that opened in 1962, and there are now more than 1800 stores in 2 countries and headquarters locations around the world, from Minnesota to Bangalore. London and even Cairo. We also have more than 40 distribution centers and are the 2nd largest importer in the US. Target has also added new businesses to core retail over the years adding: banking, pharmacy, and health care. At Target we call our customers our guests. You will hear me refer to our guests many times today: Target is committed to always providing an exceptional and delightful experiences to each and every guest. Target’s growth in stores and businesses over the past 50 years led to a large… [Technology Footprint]
- I’m sure I’m sure most of you have seen Target’s in-store technology: Cash registers, price checkers, the handheld devices used by team members to restock shelves, the new gift registry iPads, Guest WiFi that makes it easy to use the Cartwheel app on your mobile phone. Technology enables so much of store operations, that if there is any kind of technology outage, it is more efficient for the team members to wait for the issue to be resolved vs. manually stocking shelves or placing replenishment orders. Even with that much technology in our stores, there is even more technology behind the scenes from the: the applications that makes sure the Distribution Center is getting the right inventory to the right store at the right time the servers in our Data Centers. Target.com and our Guest facing mobile apps the phone systems in our Guest Contact Center You get it right: it takes a lot of technology to run a modern retailing company You might also imagine that as Target has grown over the past 50 years, our technology footprint expanded. Which means increasing … [Complexity]
- As the technology footprint expanded, the number of applications continued to increase, the number of technologies and tools grew, our infrastructure has expanded our technical debt increased and increased. So to keep up with that complexity, we added process and organizational … [Structure]
- Silos and a lot of them! We even optimized our silos to add silos within the silos because we want to be efficient! So… we have technology complexity and debt. We have organizational complexity with silos and all the while… The world continues to change…
- A lot has changed in the 50 years since Target opened the first store… How we communicate, how we dress, how we listen to music and watch TV and movies. And how we shop… We have all changed how we shop in the last 10 years
- I’m a mom with 2 kids and I think about myself and how differently I shop now then I did even 6 months ago. And my expectations continue to evolve because: Target Guests have changed how, where, and when we want to shop. Technology is in the hands of basically everyone. Its not enough to be a big box retailer anymore – its about connecting with our guests anywhere, anytime, anyhow Because the entire retail market is being… [Disrupted]
- And its being disrupted more and more frequently as the pace of innovation and changing technology continues to explode. Target needs technology to remain a leader in retail. Retail has broken away from Brick & Mortar. Target needs technology to be flexible, scalable, and have the ability to quickly test & learn new strategies with our guests, stores, even our supply chain. Marketplace disruption, technical & organization complexity… That’s the backdrop for a key technology strategy in 2012 with…. [APIs]
- We had to start creating APIs to expose core assets so Target could create cool digital experiences quickly and just simplify our internal architecture. Target’s legacy technologies had grown by point to point integrations and a very tightly coupled architecture. This made even small application changes complicated. Quarterly release cycles were the norm… and always meant risk because there would be so much change being pushed at once with lots of dependencies across our ecosystem. So, we started building our platform and APIs in 2012 focused on APIs you would expect for a retail company: like Products, Store Locations, Prices, and Promotions.
- We have built and exposed APIs from many backend providing systems that are on a variety of different platforms. These APIs enable internal apps, mobile apps and many capabilities on our .com site. We are able to quickly test and learn with different guest experiences that we build internally and when working with partners like Pinterest where you can see the price and availability of pinned items, eBay Marketplace, or Curulate to enable the LiketoBuy platform that allows Instagram users to make purchases from their feeds.
- Buy online, Pick up in Store.
- This shows a couple views from our Mobile app: Add to Cart / Ship it Add to Cart / Pick Up -> list of nearby stores with inv Add to List -> Registry Profile / Login Makes sense of course, right?!? It's been really exciting to be leading this effort for one of the worlds largest retailers! I have learned so much in the past 2.5 years and its been a journey with a lot of different roadblocks and barriers to work through. While we were building and exposing APIs, we were also blazing the path on new technologies and how to do technology work in Target’s large enterprise IT shop. It became clear early on that we wouldn’t be successful using the traditional technology and implementation patterns. We were talking about: Agile, not waterfall Smaller, more frequent releases Automating all of the things Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and of course DevOps But before I dive into those details, let’s first touch on some of the important technology choices we made to create a resilient, scalable, platform:
- Challenges: - Slow providing systems - Cost prohibitive to call directly - Unable to scale from increased demand - Need a place to aggregate data from multiple systems - Some data wasn’t even in a database to begin with
- First, we use Cassandra as our data platform. This was the first implementation of distributed NoSQL datastore at Target and we really had to sell it and convince folks in the org that it was the right technology for our use case. Cassandra was still a relatively new technology and in 2013 there weren’t many large enterprises using it or many people that had experience with it. Lots of the providing systems we needed to call were slow, unable to scale, and some of the data we needed wasn’t even in a database. Our NFRs are in milliseconds with projected TPS volumes in the thousands. Cassandra has worked really well providing the scale and distribution we needed for our APIs. Open source matters to us – we are shifting away from blackbox tools and technologies so we can be part of the community and contribute back. In fact we recently open sourced a chef cookbook that we use to automate deployments because Cassandra has been pretty easy to automate… you can check that out on our blog (target.github.io). It was appealing to step into using Cassandra leveraging the enterprise resources from Datastax. This also helped to gain buy-in across the IT organization. There is still some trepidation about using open source technologies and having the vendor support from a professional services and support perspective has been helpful to ease these concerns. We were able to move from decision to production in less than 3 months which is pretty impressive.
- I mentioned the legacy technologies we have at Target – we have a number of core systems on the mainframe so we had to do a lot of complex integrations to expose that data and move into Cassandra. In fact, there 10-12 key legacy systems with data like products, pricing, inventory that we needed to integrate with. I imagine that many people in this room have the same challenge?? This actually turned out to be one of the biggest challenges for our API program – maybe predictable? But I know many people are surprised by this. Camel turned out to work really well for these – it took some practice, but became very powerful. We also really liked it because its code and testable and not a GUI! There is sometimes a tendency in large Enterprise IT shops to rely on GUI based drag/drop integration tools and so this was a deviation from the standard patterns – but was another of many ways my team pushed change and drove a more modern approach to development. At the core of being successful with many of more modern, open sourced, technologies was building an empowered team with strong engineering and sw development skills. I could go one and one about the importance of this, but have summed up the approach I’ve taken with my team to….
- I mentioned that our team was the first to pioneer a couple different technologies in a large enterprise IT shop – we were also the first to embrace a DevOps culture, full stack ownership, and CI/CD. This has been essential to a lot of our success in addition to setting the standard for how software development is done across the organization. I find myself spending as much time evangelizing APIs as I do DevOps and CI/CD. We use a pretty standard toolchain: using Git, Jenkins, Artifactory, Chef, and Open Stack. Its really exciting to see the adoption of these approaches across the broader org.
- Our entire stack is automated with Chef – including Cassandra. Managing everything with code is important to us – especially as we continue to scale and grow. We’re able to easily and predictably scale because of this automation and the technologies we use. In retail, we see our volumes for our API platform increase more than 10x during our peak season which starts on Thanksgiving / Black Friday. And you can imagine that our business teams are always looking for new and interesting ways to drive more sales and experiences for our guests. This automation has been critical to enable us to respond to new business strategies – even 2x or 4x our systems in weeks, days, or hours. This wouldn’t be possible without the full stack automation that we have built over the past 2 years. We also have full stack logging/monitoring in splunk: this has been incredibly important to correlate across all of our layers and trouble shoot when issues occur. We all know that issues will occur – and power of full stack visibility and ownership means that my team can recover and resolve these issues quickly.
- I mentioned that using Datastax was an easy way for us to step into using Cassandra. DataStax Ops Center makes it really easy for our Level 2 support team to get an easy glance of our system health. We have a 20 node
- We have over 30 APIs in production with monthly volumes of more than 1.5 billon. This was tripled since I gave a similar talk last July! In a typical week we have more than 80 deployments and 250 commits each week. Our platform and APIs are incredibly stable: We have less than 10 incidents each month I also love to talk about the business case. The investment has generated a IRR % with a really significant NPV as well! In fact, part of our success includes capturing the metrics of our story. When we first started more than 2 years ago, we didn’t have all of these metrics. I couldn’t see number of deploys or which developers were committing at what frequency. Its been an awesome 3 year journey! And its incredibly exciting to be a part of making this happen at Target. We are a technology company and are committed to making DevOps a reality at Target.
- The story I just told, is all about the highly reusable enterprise APIs that we identified in the early days for enabling digital experiences at Target. 2015 has a number of important strategies and work ahead of us. A creating a more robust enterprise data platform. We have started to scratch the surface and have accelerated our work in this space. I mentioned that most of our API platform is hosted in target DCs. Gradually shifting this to the cloud will be a focus to gain geographical dispersion and proximity to our guests. We are focused on a ‘Services First’ approach to integration. Moving away from point/point integrations with a focus on integration as an application concern Shifting to a modern approach for how we do technology work