GigaOM » fedex

FedEx CIO shares his thoughts on the architecture required for “epic data”

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:15:38 +0000

Shipping powerhouse FedEx has been generating big data for years, but now it’s prepping for the future. By attaching digital information in the form of sensors inside its packages, FedEx thinks can bring together the digital and physical worlds to expand its customer service and its business.

FedEX CIO Robert Carter, who spoke at the IT Expo in Austin on Thursday, explained that this act of attaching bits to real-world atoms creates opportunities galore.

“The information we apply to the physical world creates an incredible opportunity for us,” Carter said. “When we apply more bits to the atoms, we create more opportunity for interactions, more opportunities to do business, and opportunities to change how you see the world.” In later conversation with a few reporters, he explained how this lofty vision affects IT, and how changes in IT bring about this vision.

Paving the way for “epic data”

FedEx’s home page in 1994

FedEx has a history of embracing technology that gets it closer to its customers. Its first web site was put in place in 1994 and was just a basic HTML page that asked for customers to enter their tracking number, then communicated that info back to a mainframe. The mainframe figured out where the package was and shot the info back to the customer. Today, it offers a basic native app on all platforms that’s basically a superficial “skin” that talks back to myriad FedEx services to give customers the tools and information they need.

As FedEx has grown, the backend infrastructure to support the organization has adapted accordingly, with FedEx using gear form Teradata and Greenplum to handle today’s data warehousing and analytics. Carter didn’t say how much data the company generates a day, but noted that it has exabytes and exabytes of data that it generates from the 9 million shipments it averages daily. His so-called “epic data” is then kept and stored indefinitely.

And as FedEx adds its SenseAware platform, it is adding real-time data and notifications to its infrastructure at a more granular level. That platform, which launched in 2009, contains a variety of sensors and radio chips that allow it to detect temperature, location, light and report back if a package (and its contents) hits a problem. The SenseAware device, which is a roughly 6 inches by 6 inches, gets dropped into high-value packages like diamonds or human organs and can proactively monitor the package for 96 hours and then alert recipients and senders if something endangers or waylays the package.

Because the SenseAware device has a radio, it is constantly broadcasting information back to FedEx, and can generate a lot of data that must be acted on in real time. Without the right infrastructure, that might be overwhelming. Still, Carter notes that the bulk of FedEx’s exabytes of data are structured and sent from different services to the same message bus where decisions or further analytics can happen.

In the future, databases are for archival purposes

“There is so much coming online that allows us to look at large data sets. From the technical mindset, what’s happening fundamentally is a shift from the reason databases even existed,” Carter explained. Databases were built because memory was precious and operations and IT staff had to allocate when and what made it into memory at any given time. But in modern data centers and computing architectures there’s plenty of addressable memory and cabinets of non-volatile flash memory available for applications. “Databases will become archival rather than a system of record,” Carter said.

Carter compares it to having a file cabinet versus having a more brain-like process with a matrix of information the computer can harness. But FedEx has some advantages in building that matrix. For example, much of its data comes from pre-determined processes such as existing routes or metrics affecting its business and, thus, is mostly structured. Carter says that only a few elements of data, such as the monitoring of Facebook and Twitter to talk to customers, are relatively unstructured.

He anticipates the future of his many exabytes of data as being dumped into a pool of storage with some metadata attached to the files so it can be analyzed. It sounds closer to a key-value store or even some of the NoSQL efforts, although he said FedEx isn’t using many of the new open source data stores or analytics out there, relying in Greenplum’s Hadoop distribution for analysis today.

As companies seek to embrace and use big data, it’s clear that the way data is stored and analyzed is changing. Bt understanding that the application of data to physical items like packages can generate huge opportunities shouldn’t be forgotten either. Big data needs to be used to produce big (or even little) insights.

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How emerging technologies will influence collaboration

David Coleman — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 06:55:35 +0000

Workplaces are changing because of trends like BYOD and gamification. But other emerging technologies are also altering not only what our work and space look like but also how we collaborate on that work. This piece delves into the different types of collaboration to provide a baseline of concepts. It then examines how emerging technologies like driverless cars, brain science, and 3D printers are being used to further collaboration in the near and far future. These advancements will not only support more and better types of collaboration in the workplace but will also impact where we work, what a workspace is, what we work on (literally), and how we share our work.

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Two (more) signs that our economy is in trouble

Om Malik — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:00:17 +0000

You and I don’t need to see charts to figure out that our economy is in deep trouble. Nevertheless, here are two that show that we are facing some headwinds and the impact of that is going to be felt in the tech economy as well. In a note to their clients this morning, Macquarie Capital’s research group pointed out:

Demand for power generation in the US (Y/Y growth in demand, excluding weather-related usage) has historically tracked closely with GDP growth and declines over the past several months suggest that GDP growth will remain muted, at least over the near term.

Similarly,

FedEx and UPS shipment trends represent another indicator of consumer purchasing behavior. Shipping volume fell off dramatically in both shippers’ largest segments during the last downturn in ’08-’09 (with a more rapid and deeper impact at FDX); domestic express volume growth turned negative at FedEx in the firm’s fiscal fourth quarter ’11 (ended April ’11) and continued to decelerate through the August quarter.

More importantly, FedEx cited a more cautious outlook for volume trends through the holiday season and into early 2012. Underpinning the weakening volume trends is a slowdown in consumer demand, particularly related to consumer electronics items manufactured in Asia and shipped to U.S. consumers. FedEx CEO Fred Smith’s quote from the call (on this year’s holiday shipping season): “We don’t anticipate a significant peak this year.”

FedEx/UPS data portends bad news in particular for e-commerce companies, which in turn can have reverberations through the rest of the tech ecosystem.

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Do the Best Web Workers Think Like Gamers?

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:10:27 +0000

Ask the typical manager of a dispersed team what sort of mindset he hopes to encourage in his employees and the last answer you’d expect to get is that of a gamer. Think “online gamer,” and most people conjure images of young men devoting endless hours to slaying orcs in World of Warcraft — probably not your dream employee.

But there are some very serious suit-and-tie types suggesting that in the networked, geographically dispersed workplace of the future, the mental traits of World of Warcraft enthusiasts may be hugely beneficial. Primary among these advocates is FedEx CIO Rob Carter who famously told a conference back in 2007 that the best training for those who want to succeed in the future is the massive multi-player game. In a Time article from 2009, Carter explained his thinking:

WoW, as its 10 million devotees worldwide call it, offers a peek into the workplace of the future. Each team faces a fast-paced, complicated series of obstacles called quests, and each player, via his online avatar, must contribute to resolving them or else lose his place on the team. The player who contributes most gets to lead the team — until someone else contributes more. The game… is intensely collaborative, constantly demanding and often surprising. “It takes exactly the same skill set people will need more of in the future to collaborate on work projects,” says Carter.

If you think Carter is just a closet level-80 guild master, then consider the company he’s keeping in promoting the gamer mindset. USC professors John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas have publicly promoted the advantages of thinking like a gamer on the Harvard Business Review blog, noting game enthusiasts are bottom-line oriented, tolerant of diversity, comfortable with constant change, happy to learn, and intensely interested in innovation.

“We believe that gamers who embody this disposition are better able than their nongamer counterparts to thrive in the twenty-first-century workplace,” the scholars conclude.

If you’re unsure how you might actually put gaming techniques to use in the workplace, check out Aliza’s post about the gamification of work. Another source of practical tips is author and speaker Tom Chatfield. In a recent TED talk, he explains the techniques game designers use to engage the brain — from rapid, clear, frequent feedback to multiple long- and short-term aims — and suggests these can be adopted by management to make your team nearly as obsessed with work as the stereotypical WoW fanatic is with conquering a dungeon:

Photo courtesy Flickr user jerine, CC 2.0)

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Apple tells FedEx to delay shipments of Leopard

Josh Pigford — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:46:42 +0000

Well this is interesting. I pre-ordered my copy of Leopard the first day it was available to do so. Apple guaranteed shipment on October 26 (today).

The package was shipped via FedEx Priority Overnight which has a guaranteed delivery time of 10:30AM (unless you live in a remote area…which last time I checked Denver, CO wasn’t a “remote area”).

I woke up this morning giddy like a 5 year old boy at Christmas to see that my copy of Leopard was on a truck and out for delivery still, according to FedEx, scheduled to be delivered by 10:30AM.

Well, at about 10:15AM I checked the packaged status and it had the message “Delivery Exception – Future delivery requested.” I certainly didn’t request a “future delivery.”

So I gave FedEx a call to see who requested it. I had a hunch that Apple might have done it. Sure enough, the support agent confirmed my hunch with the following message:

This morning Apple made a request to us that FedEx disregard any guaranteed delivery times and instead deliver them end-of-day today as opposed to by 10:30AM.

Awesome. I must now wait an additional 6-8 hours for my beloved Leopard because Apple doesn’t want people to get their copies before the 6PM launch parties tonight.

Yes, I am aware that people have been getting their copies as early as Wednesday. No, I don’t really care that much that I’ve got to wait another few hours.

I do have to say that this seems to be a bit of a sleazy move on Apple’s part, though. It seems, if anything, the people that pre-ordered it should somehow be rewarded for forking over money for something we haven’t really even seen or used yet as opposed to intentionally delaying things.

Again, I’m being somewhat facetious about this. I just find it to be an interesting move on Apple’s part to micromanage things this far down the line.

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