Well, hello everybody. Here we are at Adobe Max 2009 in lovely Los Angeles, not Las Vegas. And this is Michael Coté, of course, with RedMonk, and we've got a guest with ourselves. Would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Adam Mollenkopf. I work for FedEx Custom Critical, and glad to be here today. And so I was talking with you a little bit before the filming, and we were kind of going to the pretty interesting demo that we're going to see in a little bit. But the first thing, I'd never actually heard of FedEx Critical. So could you tell people what exactly FedEx Critical is? Absolutely. Most of you are probably familiar with FedEx, the express and the ground and the freight. Custom Critical is a unique part of FedEx that specializes in shipping things that are very time sensitive, so things that need to move from New York to Miami, very expedited. So if somebody's got an assembly lined down or something, we can move apart to fix that appropriately. We also do special carrying handling, so we do a lot of sensitive shipments for perishable goods and other items of that nature. So essentially you have, I forget, the agent, you have an agent, and they're kind of looking at a console, and then all the various trucks are feeding into the agent's view of something. And then I guess you have customers calling in every five minutes to check on their shipment and want to know where it is or something like that. I mean, is that the kind of typical scenario for a shipment that might be going around? Exactly. I mean, so the things we ship are very high value, and we need to know to the minute, to the location, what's happening on it at any given point in time. And then 10 of the application that we'll show in just a minute is basically to detect abnormal events and present those to somebody to take proactive action on it before it becomes a bad situation and to automate all the normal events. So when we get a position fixed on a vehicle and it's still going to meet the expected time of arrival, we don't really want to nuisance an agent with that as we have in the past. So we just want them to look at the abnormal situations, exception management. The system that we'd been talking about earlier was basically tracking a truck or whatever as it's moving along. And I'm curious, when you were looking at the requirements for what you were going to build, how did you come to the Adobe stuff? How did you make it like an RIA, essentially?
2:00It was actually quite a long process to get to the Adobe solution and finally found a good solution with Adobe. So we experimented with a number of other technologies for the last few years, honestly. We tried this with Swing. We tried this with Ajax component vendors. And had miserable performance and scalability issues with it in the past. And just due to the sheer volume of the thousands of trucks that we're trying to ship and the thousands of trucks that we're trying to track and the shipments that we're trying to track as well, just the amount of volume was too much for those frameworks to handle. And data services, lifecycle, and a lot of the other Adobe technologies, Flex and Specific, allowed for us to have a nice visualization of that that was effective. Given those requirements, I mean, what was it about lifecycle data services and Flex that fit it better than, say, like Swing or Ajax or something like that? Well, data management was a big part of lifecycle data services when we selected that. So being able to bind automatically to the client and bind automatically to other clients. So if you're an agent at Custom Critical and I'm an agent at Custom Critical and we're looking at the same shipment and you modify something or something in the field modifies it, the truck does something that causes a new state. Being able to see that in near real-time with very low latency was very important. So both from a data management and from a push, having a true push technology, which is something that's been absent in the past. Right. So the RTMP, the real-time messaging protocol, is provided and a true push protocol that's socket-based up to the client. Right, right. Versus like HTTP or something like that. And the server, the amount of data going back to the server is minimized. So it's an observer pattern. So the client just has an open socket and we push anything he wants to observe as it changes. So we're not killing our servers and we have a lot less server requirements as far as number of servers to support this. What was the development process like for when you, like you said, you went through several alternatives. And then when you did settle on using parts of the Adobe stack for it, like how long did that take and what was the process for doing it?
4:01It was fairly quick with the Adobe stuff. So I got hooked up with, you know, a couple folks at Adobe and we basically did a couple proof of concepts. And it was fairly quick and actually we did most of the work on our own. It didn't require a lot of Adobe assistance because it was pretty well documented. And we were able to go in there and test out the two major features that we were looking for. So the data management and the push technology. And honestly, we had had lots of experience trying it with other solutions. Right. So you had your requirements all figured out, essentially. Right. So it was pretty well defined and it was kind of like, well, we don't have this solution. Well, we still don't have a solution. And we came across Adobe and now we do have a solution. You guys are using this now and it's finished. And like, what are your plans for it in the future? To extend it. So, I mean, what we'll show you here is just the start of what we're going to do. So there's a lot of other areas that we're going to apply this to, not only just shipment tracking, but also how we do, how we price things to the customer, how do we analyze history, how do we analyze things over geography and time. So being able to reason both over space and time at micro and macro views. So I guess there's sort of new information about things you could sell your customers, to put it one way. But you have a new understanding of things, business practices that you were doing in the past that you can fine tune and make up new products and things to sell to them, right? Right. Yeah, actually some new revenue generating things that came out of this is our security surveillance. So being able to show our customer that, you know, we have a, almost like a network operations center, but we have a security operations center that's basically tracking these things to this detail. That puts a lot of ease to the customer's minds when they're shipping something very high value or something extremely sensitive, which is our specialty. Having talked about the demo so much, let's check it out.