In this episode, Arnie Leap, CIO of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc., talks about why going headless is the key to efficiency, how they’ve incorporated the cloud into dozens of the brands they’ve acquired or built, how to best leverage your data, and much more.
In this episode, Arnie Leap, CIO of 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc., talks about why going headless is the key to efficiency, how they’ve incorporated the cloud into dozens of the brands they’ve acquired or built, how to best leverage your data, and much more.
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[00:00:00]
Steve Hamm: Arnie. It's great to have you on the show.
Arnie Leap: It's great to be here.
Steve Hamm: Yeah. Now, most people are familiar with one 800 flowers.com, but many probably think of it as simply a, a flower gifting service it's much bigger and broader than that. Right. What's the company up to these.
Arnie Leap: It's a great question, Steve, in a one 800 flowers.com is a leading provider and gifts designed to help customers express, connect, and celebrate with their loved ones and friends.
Our business platform features all star family of brands, including Harry and David personalization, wall.com 1-800-FLOWERS.
Of course Shari's berries, Cheryl's cookies, and many others. We engage our customers through differentiated product and unique services, helping them connect with the important people in their lives.
Steve Hamm: No, that sounds great. I know that 1-800-FLOWERS has a [00:01:00] culture of innovation goes way back. Could you talk about the heritage of innovation and also how the company is innovating today?
Arnie Leap: I I've been with the company a little less than eight years and the company's been around for more than 40. Um, we're proud to have a continued growth and innovation. The course of this journey, and we are constantly challenging ourselves to disrupt everything that we do to make it a better experience for our customers company was started as a single flower shop in Manhattan in 1976 and quickly expanded to a dozen brick and mortar retail shops in the New York area.
From there. The company was able to acquire 1-800-FLOWERS as a phone number in 1986. Doesn't seem that far ago for a go, but it is. And a lot of things have occurred since then we went on to pioneer online retailing, [00:02:00] and the one 800 flowers.com brand was born over time. We've acquired or built more than a dozen brands under corporate entity.
Of one 800 flowers.com, Inc. Including Harry and David personalization. mall.com is one of our more recent acquisitions. Cheryl's cookies, Sherry's berries and more creating an exciting destination for gifting and sharing consistent with our DNA over time, where we want to make sure that innovation is constantly top of mind.
We were pioneers of the oh 809. We were the first merchant partner on AOL. If some, remember AOL, the first mobile floral gift center and a platform called Blackberry smartphones. If people remember that one of the greatest phones ever was the Blackberry Pearl. of the first retailers of five major [00:03:00] conversational commerce channels.
So in the course of the last five years, in a period of probably I want to say about nine months, the company was able to launch its experience in Facebook messenger, apple business chat, Amazon Don's Alexa Google's assistant and Samsung Bixy plat, Bixby platinum. Today, we're leveraging all sorts of these emerging technologies, as well as AI automation, machine learning, augmented reality.
And we're dabbling in a whole bunch of other areas for personalized experience where the customers, we don't necessarily know where our customers are going to go next, but we certainly want to make sure that we have an understanding of where they may be going to make sure we can all sort of meet up and, and do business together in a future. You know, our newest headless commerce platform is probably the most [00:04:00] significant technology investment. The company's made over the course of the last, or I want to say 20 years, um, we're year three into the platform. Um, it's completely been built ground up microservices driven platform. It sits on top of, uh, Google cloud. does things in ways that were incredibly complicated and difficult in the past is now incredibly, um, efficient and economic for us to move forward and drastically make changes the commerce platform.
Steve Hamm: Wait, wait, before you go there. So headless services, what does that mean? What does that mean? And what does it do?
Arnie Leap: Uh, great question headless. I mean, we don't want to be violent, so it's really not, not about being violent, but it is a technology approach. Um, that basically builds out microservices platforms and it gives you this collection of services. [00:05:00] And the objective is, is that headless means that, that front side.
So regardless of the front side or the quote unquote display. Of the website, the web content or the apparent need for a end user device. So an iPad versus a desktop versus a laptop or all different technologies. They're front end. Is all a little different it's coded differently because there are different devices and the technique and concept of being headless means that we're not necessarily developing for a specific end user device, but we develop in general to make sure that we can publish to.
The devices, regardless of its head. And therefore we refer to it as headless commerce platforms. The microservices platform resides in the cloud, giving us enhanced performance, flexibility, and scalability. So operations. And so to be [00:06:00] able to be micro driven, microservices driven cloud-based it gives us that scalability up and down as the business needs are required. The nice thing about that is we don't have to necessarily. The incredibly accurate in forecasting, how much capacity compute capacity we're going to need in the future.
We just sort of dial it up as we need it. Uh, it gave us a tremendous amount of flexibility. The other
Steve Hamm: see that. Let me just say so back in the old days, when you were on prem, you had to own all of that. And a lot of it was just sitting there idle, right? But now you just scale up and down in the cloud and that's a brilliant use of the.
Arnie Leap: It's incredible. And it's, it's been a wonderful partnership and journey with a series of partners involved in the platform build out. Um, we. W we took a chance on a couple of different, smaller vendors to be pretty niche in that, that effort. And they've performed very well. It's amazing what startups and motivated to do.[00:07:00]
Um, and the partnerships have been great. So we were able to dial up and dial down as needed. We can support those peaks and valleys. Um, it also gives our business the flexibility to do things as well. And what I mean by that is. We had one of the large cloud providers in, um, giving a presentation about four, four years ago.
And it was about software releases and the frequency of software releases. We were coming off. One of our better releases about four years ago. It was a culmination of the team's effort over the course of about three months. And we will finally getting through the testing and everybody could see the light at the end of the tunnel that we were actually going to go release this and everything was going to be great.
And we had this presentation by one cloud provider and they were so, um, surprised as to the level of innovation that we are as a [00:08:00] company that are. Frequency of software releases was once a business quarter. And because they were releasing software on a daily basis and I'm like, wow, you know, you go from waterfall to agile delivery methodologies and project management, and you can certainly get to that point.
And that's an incredible feat. And I remember Chris McCann, after the meeting asking me, he goes, you know, Hey, I want to be more like them. How do we get to Delhi?
Steve Hamm: Right.
Arnie Leap: And we set out on this path to build out our commerce platform, headless commerce platform with the microservices backside. And, you know, we joke about that every once in a while in the office.
And we tell Chris, Hey, you know, we overachieved on that. Being able to release software on a daily basis, we can release software about every 45 minutes, if we really needed to. [00:09:00] And it it's a Testament to the innovation. Um, we, we, as a company, it's in our DNA and I can absolutely attest that. That's true.
And we challenge ourselves day in and day out. How do we get better? What's the continuous improvement operations look like? What are we working on? How do we change that? What do we, what are we, uh, Shutting down, what are we moving away from? And how do we pivot to have just a better situation and better approach 45
Steve Hamm: mentioned, yeah. You mentioned a minute ago, you know, how important the cloud is to what you do and to, you know, having a cyclical business. Tell us a little bit of the background there. When and why did you start mass migrating your data to the cloud?
How do you manage it there? How do you integrate it? Share it, all those kinds of good things that turn it from data into value.
Arnie Leap: Great question. Um, we, um, you know, you sorta the decision to go cloud [00:10:00] started a long time ago. Um, my interview process as the CIO with the leadership team at 1-800-FLOWERS back in, uh, 20, uh, the fall of 2013 was a cloud discussion. We weren't calling it cloud back then, but we were certainly trying to get to a point where we wanted to base things in a virtual environment, to be able to virtualize resources, to be able to scale them up and scale them down in general concept form.
And you know, one thing leads to another. Um, you start to see some successes in certain areas of the organization. Um, certain technologies become more mature than others. Over time. Uh, we, we accelerate certain things in certain ways. We push on things to see if we can get it to break or whether or not it's going to succeed.
And our data, our data strategy sort of fit that same mold. [00:11:00] Um, you know, we, we had very traditional relational databases. We still do. Um, there, that technology is needed for a lot of different reasons. Um, at the same time, we also need to make sure that we make, we give out. Associates and team members every possible opportunity to succeed.
And part of that is, is what's the strategy. So I spend my, my morning drive thinking about. Some weird things as a CIO, one of them is how do I enable more people to do their job efficiently today?
And they're all about cloud it's, it's, it's fascinating at this point, you can't even start to think of, you know, in, in bare metal [00:12:00] and hosting anymore because it's so antiquated. Once you start to get that fever of the cloud, we went through that process four years ago, three years ago, we were. Starting to invest less.
And our data warehousing part of the reason was, is we didn't have a clear strategy and it was important to put the strategy together first, because then we could mobilize the teams and invest and go like gangbusters. And that's exactly what we did. We reached out to snowflake. We did a couple of initial sales session.
And got into a series of discussions, technologically speaking. And as a 30 year, C-level exec 30 year experienced C level executive. We, the one area of my expertise is relational databases. And so when I [00:13:00] heard relational database in the cloud, like, I'm not sure that's true, but okay. I'm willing to try it because this is not the first time I've heard that. Um, and snowflake obliged, they brought a whole team in, we sat for half a day and we started talking about query optimization the architecture at the lowest levels and how it was solved for in the cloud versus traditional relational databases. And I was sold now. We just needed to make it. And so then I was back to the back and forth to the office and the car ride home and into the office, trying to figure out how do I mobilize 100 people getting data into snowflake and building this out appropriately.
The nice thing was, is the first decision was, is to ramp down and build a war chest of capital to start this. Now that we had our [00:14:00] destination, we just needed to get the vehicles together, gassed up and ready to go.
And that's what we did. It took us a better part of the last three years to sit here today and say that, you know, we have, uh, we're approaching a petabyte of data in snowflake.
We have over a thousand users in snowflake on a daily basis.
It's just incredible how fast once technology works, it's fast. It's amazing how fast people adopt to it. Right. And
Steve Hamm: cloud. Let's pivot here a little bit, talk about a couple of the most important ways that you use the data cloud. You know, the applications that the analytics, you know, the results you're getting out of it.
Arnie Leap: Yeah. The audience let's talk about who our audiences and who our customers are. So my, as the technology group leader, I have customers just like everybody else in business. At some point you can identify your customers. Mine happened to be [00:15:00] pretty demanding as it relates to accuracy and information that's needed at the right time in the right place. And so assembling a petabyte worth of data. It doesn't happen overnight and we needed some sound architecture about the design. So we have a database solely structured for our customer profiles and the history of our customers, as well as a separate database. Just, just solely transactional. As we said earlier in the podcast, we were talking about how many brands the portfolio is.
Well, we acquired those brands that's means they had their own stuff. They were doing their own thing. They had their order definition, order object, definition that was different than ours. We needed to, um, assimilate and get, get a standard order object together. We need to get a standard customer object together.
We needed to be able to process that data into [00:16:00] one location in a central location and do it in a way that we could leverage going forward. And so those, all of those records. Hundreds of millions of data records stored and snowflake now have to be accessed on the other side and, and used with analytics, uh, where a huge customer would, um, SAS from an analytic standpoint, as well as Tableau from a reporting point of view.
Um, we do a whole bunch of different machine learning capabilities and different models with different partners. Um, the data that goes in and out or. Ellie basis in and out of snowflake is growing exponentially right now. Um, we see the usage levels going incredibly up where it's one thing to have the data.
It's another to be able to leverage it. And then it's even more important to be able to take advantage of it at the right time.
Steve Hamm: Yeah. You've [00:17:00] talked about those, all those different brands that were brought in by acquisition and the efforts to kind of integrate stuff. Not mean, I would imagine that a core part of your business is being able is in the cloud. Now you're able to integrate data from all those different brands and have them share it.
Is, is that something that's really important to you and how are you doing that?
Arnie Leap: Yeah, a large part of our strategy is acquisition. Um, we see a consolidation in the gifting industry. Um, you know, a lot of smaller brands. Um, Sherry's berries is a perfect example. Being able to leverage our e-commerce platform. So we acquired Shari's berries. It was a true marketing play for us. Within six hours of closing that transaction, we were transacting Sherri's barriers on our [00:18:00] website, collecting the order information and pushing that into our data lake within snowflake.
So you sort of sit back and you say, wow, you know, you can turn a transaction. Uh, business transaction of an acquisition. And in six hours time, you're selling the product, marketing it appropriately, and actually getting orders in to your data, data warehouse, and reporting platform. It's a, it's a wonderful case study to be able to do now.
Steve Hamm: So was Sherry's berries already on snowflake or you were able to do this, this thing, you know, like from scratch.
Arnie Leap: Scratch. They weren't on snowflake.
Steve Hamm: that's amazing.
Arnie Leap: Yeah. So we turned that in six hours and everybody's like, all right, now what?
Steve Hamm: Yeah.
Arnie Leap: Like, all right, who's next?
Steve Hamm: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. I mean, it seems like one of the key things we've talked a little bit about sharing [00:19:00] data between the different business units, the different, the different brands, you know, these days third-party data kind of being brought in and blended and mixed with all that internal data is really important.
So talk about that with, with what you're doing, what's the importance of being able to get, you know, be able to access third party data and integrate it with your own internal data.
Arnie Leap: It's the new way of doing things. It's um, the data exchange capabilities, a snowflake has been an eye-opener, just continuing to leverage a well-architected platform is snowflake to be able to have something called a, uh, an interactive data exchange is just incredible. Uh, you know, we've been through some tough times society.
Um, the human race with COVID and the last 18 months has been a real challenge. Um, people had to figure out how, [00:20:00] how to continue to keep living and moving on and being able to still express themselves, connect with loved ones and do things from at a minimum six feet away. It also challenged our business.
Uh, our, our consumer behavior was changing and it was changing rapidly and there was all sorts of reports on a daily basis. Certainly here in New York with daily briefings and every state having their daily health briefings, we needed more information, which is kind of interesting. We needed secondary data sets and tertiary data sets to be able to augment some of our analysis that.
And one of the areas we were sitting in a leadership meeting, uh, about a year, I want to say about a year ago. And there was a, you know, Johns Hopkins is producing a lot of great data as it relates to. Oh, interesting. Yeah. If we, you know, if we could get [00:21:00] some of the, the latest stats, we could run some models, we could start to understand maybe and correlate, um, purchase behavior differently, depending on the current health state of, of a certain region of. Like, huh. So I talked to, um, a team member of mine who runs our BI and data analysis on the technology side, said, you know, the snowflake exchange, they got any COVID data. It's like, yeah. You know, a matter of fact there is, I said, how long would it take us to get that transaction through the, through the exchange is probably about five minutes.
Steve Hamm: Right.
Arnie Leap: And he said, it'll probably take me longer to go back to my desk than it would be to actually get the data into our snowflake environment. So literally he did, he walked back to his desk. He enabled the COVID data sources from the data exchange. And we were able to give that to our analytics team within a half an hour.
[00:22:00] And we sort of walked down to the exact, the other executives and said, okay guys, you asked for it. Now you have. Now you need to go do what you want to do with the data. And I'm like, well, what do you mean? I'm like, yeah, well, the snow, the COVID data is now up to date as of yesterday. And here's all the latest trends analysis that you can do with it and how you can apply it to your model and that's the beauty of the snow snowflake platform is, is it just seems like we can continuously leverage more of it and it creates such a tremendous.
Steve Hamm: Yeah. That's amazing to think about, cause you know, the marketplace has always been the most efficient place to do commerce and, and to have it [00:24:00] kind of like in the cloud available. Innumerable suppliers, innumerable users, uh, meeting there and matching. It's just kind of a really, it's the, one of the most powerful things about the cloud.
I think so. Yeah. Hey. Personalized personalization is, is a huge issue for retailers, especially, you know, kind of in the online delivery and all that kind of stuff. But you have a particularly big challenge because almost all the, the buyers of your products and services. Are buying the products and services for somebody else.
So it's not for them, it's for somebody else. So it's like, you're one step removed. How do you gather all that kind of data and learn from it, you know, with, with that secondary step that has to be involved. I mean, and how does snowflake help.
Arnie Leap: It's a great question. And even a bigger challenge. [00:25:00] Uh, the gifting paradigm, as it relates to personalization is a very complicated process to go through because we engage with our customers. Sometimes it's self-consumption other times it's a gift. And what makes the gifting portion. More challenging for us is we allow our customers to express themselves to their friends and loved ones directly from our platform.
Meaning you can fill out a greeting card and we can send it our, the gift directly to. It doesn't have to come to your house first. You don't have to wrap it and then put a card on it and then put it back in a box and then send it off to the, to them. So the convenience of being able to gift directly is an important one for any retailer data, as it [00:26:00] relates to being once removed. Is even harder to manage because you have to manage some level of context, some level of, of relationship between the parties, meaning customer. Their wife or their spouse, their husband, their daughter, their son, daughter-in-law aunts, uncles. Right. So all of a sudden you get a managed relationships and to a whole bunch of other things within the datas that. And what eventually happens is, is you still need that at your fingertips, right? You're at the Beck and call at the time that the customer or consumer decides that they want to express themselves. an awful amount of data that needs to be available and readily available at our fingertips to help personalize the engagement of our platform and whether it be by mobile device, by tablet, by desktop, [00:27:00] by chat messages.
Or voice with a customer service agent. All of those channels all need to be fulfilled with the right data at the right time with the proper context and snowflake provides because it's, cloud-based gives us the ability to morph the edges of the cloud to each one of those channels differently while providing a reasonably seamless experience.
For our customers, snowflake has made some great technological advances in the last year or so by launching their node JS, uh, interface. So our headless commerce platform, which is. Got that has and supports no JS or developers can actually access data directly from the snowflake warehouse.
Um, and from the cloud directly in a [00:28:00] secure manner, providing context. To our website and our presentation layers to the different devices that are available. Um, and, and what that, what does that do actually? I mean, what it does is it just changes the paradigm in the equation of how we deliver data to the front side, to be able to present some level of engaging interface for our customers to express themselves.
It is, it is. Amazing to be able to actually sit here and say that versus where we were 5, 7, 8 years.
Steve Hamm: Yeah. Yeah. You know, you you've, you've talked very convincingly about the, the, the value you've gotten out of moving the data to the cloud, managing it there. But I know there are challenges in this too. I mean, it's a, it's a huge shift. What are the kind of like the biggest one or two challenges that you faced in moving data to the cloud and how have you overcome you overcome them?[00:29:00]
Arnie Leap: The challenges about processing data will haunt man forever. The human race, the human race will forever be challenged by processing data. The question is, is how good are you at using certain tools and how creative can you be? For example, not everybody's a carpenter and there are certain people I would not trust, swinging a hammer.
There are also certain people that know how to draw a wonderful picture of their family and loved ones and hanging on a wall that I wouldn't necessarily trust certain people with a pencil. So what tools are available and what skills do you have? And this gets back to the notion of. How do I, as a CIO, enable enough of [00:30:00] the team at the right times with the right tools to make them successful in what they do. Right. And four years ago, we made the conscious decision to ramp down some of the investments in the data warehouse. And because we knew we were going to shift gears, we built up a war chest. We started looking at different tools and different capabilities, understanding roadmaps of certain companies that in their tool sets and how they work.
And so. Then as we, you know, all of a sudden we have this wonderful pool of assets that we can go acquire tools at the right time, at the right place when the team's ready to actually approach that problem or solve that specific challenge. And then take advantage of it appropriately. Um, and it is timing.
Timing's a big piece of it. You have to have, you know, you have to have a need. There has to be an identifiable tool and then you need to be able to act on it without slowing down the [00:31:00] momentum. Of the projects that you're working on and it, you know, data is the same way. Um, you know, we're not talking about 30, 30 records, we're talking about 30 million records moving from point a to point B and going through some validation and transformation, you do that at different points in time, depending on what's going on.
Certainly. We're processing 25 to 30 million records. It's an hour in certain data sources that we need to make sure running through very efficient data scrubbers and validators and, uh, enhancement capabilities, um, while staging that data in appropriate places and allow things to process. Those are very complicated capabilities.
When we start looking at our next activity. What's their order object look like what's their customer object look like exhibit to be different than what we have. Now. The question is, is do you map certain fields to certain, you know, uh, standard fields that we [00:32:00] have, or is it time to extend our standard record and accommodate these new data elements that are needed?
All part of that while applying governance, security, accessibility. Uh, value proposition of why we're storing that data and then teaching the team across the hundreds and thousands of people that need that data on a day in and day out basis. Uh, all of those things require tools
and what we, what we like, what we're seeing in the marketplace right now is snowflakes becoming a native dataset to these tools. Which wasn't necessarily the case three, four years ago. .
Steve Hamm: Yeah. That makes total sense. Now you've done a tremendous job here today of kind of describing this journey that I think a lot of other companies, some, you know, some big companies are still in the very early stages of doing, but you guys are way along in the process, years along.
So [00:33:00] talk. Like what's happening right now in terms of the technology, the Nutella analogies that are coming, the new capabilities, the new demands from your data scientists, what do you see? The major trends and themes that are coming over the next year or so?
Arnie Leap: The themes are being able to be efficient at. Doing some level of analysis, whether or not it be a static data analysis model or whether or not be an AI based model, taking that in that output, putting it into the next layer of models as an input, running those models, taking the out. And going into a third, a fourth layer of models, and then getting that data appropriately set up.
So just because you have unlimited resources doesn't mean that makes you the smartest people in the world. [00:34:00] All it means is you have a lot of data. The question is how do you leverage it and how do you create value with it? Just because you have a billion records doesn't mean you have to run a machine learning model across a billion records.
And so what we need to be able to do, it's that old analogy, you know, are you boiling the ocean or you boiling a cup of water?
And in our world, everybody starts, uh, oh my God, we got a billion records in a dataset. Let's go run a model and see what comes out. Kind of curious. Okay. Yeah. But if it takes a week to run the model, you better make sure it's a Salesforce casting model and not a personalization model that the customer needs in the next 30 seconds in order to conduct their transaction.
So there's, there's different calls for different, um, uh, different needs of the business at different times. And so what we see across the horizon is how do you start to layer in leverage these models [00:35:00] where input and output starts to become blurred, and you get this homogeneous environment that sort of lives in a, in a quasi, uh, Uh, fluid world where data starts to flow from one side to another, and it starts to happen in ways that we didn't quite think of before, but we can control and manage the outcome of it.
If you know, marketing is a simple thing, it's, it's, it's funny. You, you know, years ago you send out a catalog and you send a catalog to a million people, it costs you $10. Per per catalog or $10 million to send those million catalogs, you get $25 million in return. So you get $25 on average per catalog sold at a cost of $10 each.
So you making a profit of $15. So you're netting [00:36:00] $15. In this example, logic says, well, if I want to double. My revenue next year, I'll send out 2 million catalogs, but it's going to cost me $50 million and I'm still going to get $15 per, per catalog and an in net sales. Well, any statistics person knows, and you don't have to be an expert to know that that's an average and that's not always going to be the case.
So we some level of a bell curve and you have to figure out where you are on a curve. Are you heading up and accelerating or are you heading down on the other side and decelerating that model? So when we look at these large numbers this way, and it will start to become, it becomes impactful in, in very quick way.
And so what we want to be able to do, and we started doing it. It's counter-intuitive, we've actually went back to the catalog distribution teams for this holiday [00:37:00] and said, you're going to make more money if you send out less catalogs. And we can say that because of the models that we built
Steve Hamm: The data shows that it's not some wild guests. Yeah. That's not. Oh, that's fantastic. That's really powerful. Yeah. Hey, I want to ask you now, you know, I want to ask you to put on your visionary cap, look out ahead like five years or more what's coming in this field that will help transform business commerce or even society.
I mean, you talked about COVID before. I mean, you could see how the numbers, how data is really. So key in, in so many big societal policy and, you know, crisis response actions. So what do you see way out there?
Arnie Leap: I, the interaction with computing devices is going to change. It's going to continue to change. Um, so the, the headless commerce bet that we made. [00:38:00] based on the five-year outlook that end compute devices are going to change. Meaning there's far less people using desktops than there were five years ago.
There's more people using tablets now than five years ago. And everybody's got a mobile phone. So our statistics and our data tells us. Based on cells that from the hours, doesn't matter a time zone east central or west, the hours of eight 30 at night and 10 30, the ratio of tablet device sales goes up. What's interesting is as of the 10 30 timeframe. Tablet tells off and [00:39:00] mobile device increases. You go from the couch,
Steve Hamm: oh, the couch to bed
Arnie Leap: to bed. Right. That's part of it. And it's so what we see five years out is how we communicate with one another is going to continue to evolve.
Everybody has these conversations. These conversational events in their life. And it's mostly around, you know, texting SMS, texting chat, Snapchat in a visual way and a video way. Instagram, all the social networks are really more geared towards consumer TechTalk. Consuming 30 seconds worth of context to try and enhance your life.
Right now, the downside of that is we're all becoming addictive to the screens and we're right. So our behavior is truly changing. Um, but it is mobile device. It's not, it's not a tablet and it's not a desktop. If you're at work and you're supposed to be [00:40:00] working and you have your screen up and you have a desk.
No. We know people are not looking at their social media on their work screen. They're looking at it on their mobile device. They're not, we're not putting our mobile devices down. We're just not disconnecting. So the methods by which we transmit. We'll continue to evolve as well. We were front runner in the commerce side with the different chat methodologies.
We see commerce increasing their, you can't go on Instagram now without seeing somebody selling a t-shirt or, or something in your feed. Right. So selling is, is, is very. And we'll continue to be different. And the nice thing is, is we're. So well-prepared with our data, our analytics, our foundation, what's snowflake that we're confident that we'll be out in front and seeing those trends early and often and taking advantage of it where we can try to help our customers figure [00:41:00] out what direction they want to go on their technological journey, as well as the ability to express connect with their loved ones and family, man.
Steve Hamm: That's heartwarming, you know?
Arnie Leap: It is, it's actually a lot of fun.
Steve Hamm: yeah, yeah. Hey, um, we typically finish on a more personal note, kind of a lighter note and your company has a tremendous variety of products. What's your personal go-to gift for friends and loved ones, people in your family.
Arnie Leap: Well, it's funny. You know, I first started, I was sending my wife flowers, like every other, every other one. And I finally got to stop sending me.
Steve Hamm: Yeah.
Arnie Leap: I won't send you flowers anymore. I'll send you a gift basket. I'll Hey, there's new product coming out. I'll send you that. Or, or test something out with my wife and my relationship.
My wife is, is, has been fabulous across the 30 years. We've married and we sorta joke about it, but the [00:42:00] go-to gift for, oil recognize an event or something. I'll probably do meat and foods out of Harry and David for a gift basket. And Sherry's berries is always a big hit, you know, I try to. I, I try to experiment with the different brands and the different capabilities and product offerings. Um, I get two sides out of it. I want us as I test to make sure everything's working correctly amongst the systems and making sure that things get delivered on time.
The second piece is, is it's just variety and it's nice to be able to share that. Um, friends and loved ones and just provide a little bit of, of variety in their, in their life. And, um, everybody likes to be [00:43:00] surprised, uh, in a pleasant way. And so, you know, the go-tos are probably across the spectrum. You know, I have, uh, I'm of the age, my kids are in college.
My friend's kids are in college. A bucket of popcorn from the popcorn factory is always a nice hit.
Steve Hamm: That's right. It doesn't have to be something big and expensive. Just a little thoughtful thing.
Arnie Leap: that's right. Hey, I hope everything's going well. As you transition back into your dorm room, here's some popcorn. But yeah, I mean, that's really the it's, uh, it's been a wonderful ride. The technology is. Fascinating right now, we're in fascinating times and certainly snowflake has done a tremendous job and in what they do and how they do it. And there aren't too many [00:44:00] companies like that, that you could say that.
Steve Hamm: That's very nice. Yeah. Uh, this has been a fascinating conversation. It's been fun. It's been wide ranging. It's been in depth, all of those things. I, you know, I thought what you said about headless commerce and, and how you're you're, you're capable of kind of having a centralized. It's almost like a content, you know, it's a content warehouse, but it's almost like a content factory where, where you can adapt to whatever device the person is using.
I thought that was really fascinating. And also when you talked about COVID and you talked about the data exchange and being able to bring in. Uh, external data, this stuff about the health of the public health data from Johns Hopkins. I thought that was fantastic. And doing just, just the idea that it could just be popped right off the data exchange you don't have to do, you have to set up a relationship with John Hopkins to get John Hopkins data.
So I thought, I thought that was really fascinating, too. So really [00:45:00] interesting conversation. Thank you so much for being with us today and best of luck with what you're doing.
Arnie Leap: Steve appreciate the time. This was fun. Happy to do it again sometime.