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Well, hello everybody. Here we are at Adobe Max 2009 in lovely Los Angeles, not Las Vegas.

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And this is Michael Coté, of course, with RedMonk, and we've got a guest with ourselves.

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Would you like to introduce yourself?

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Hi, I'm Adam Mollenkopf. I work for FedEx Custom Critical, and glad to be here today.

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And so I was talking with you a little bit before the filming, and we were kind of going

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to the pretty interesting demo that we're going to see in a little bit. But the first

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thing, I'd never actually heard of FedEx Critical. So could you tell people what exactly FedEx

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Critical is? Absolutely. Most of you are probably familiar with FedEx, the express and the ground

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and the freight. Custom Critical is a unique part of FedEx that specializes in shipping

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things that are very time sensitive, so things that need to move from New York to Miami, very

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expedited. So if somebody's got an assembly lined down or something, we can move apart to fix

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that appropriately. We also do special carrying handling, so we do a lot of sensitive shipments

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for perishable goods and other items of that nature.

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So essentially you have, I forget, the agent, you have an agent, and they're kind of looking

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at a console, and then all the various trucks are feeding into the agent's view of something.

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And then I guess you have customers calling in every five minutes to check on their shipment

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and want to know where it is or something like that. I mean, is that the kind of typical

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scenario for a shipment that might be going around?

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Exactly. I mean, so the things we ship are very high value, and we need to know to the

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minute, to the location, what's happening on it at any given point in time. And then 10 of

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the application that we'll show in just a minute is basically to detect abnormal events and present

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those to somebody to take proactive action on it before it becomes a bad situation and to

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automate all the normal events. So when we get a position fixed on a vehicle and it's still

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going to meet the expected time of arrival, we don't really want to nuisance an agent with

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that as we have in the past. So we just want them to look at the abnormal situations, exception

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management.

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The system that we'd been talking about earlier was basically tracking a truck or whatever

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as it's moving along. And I'm curious, when you were looking at the requirements for what

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you were going to build, how did you come to the Adobe stuff? How did you make it like an

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RIA, essentially?

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It was actually quite a long process to get to the Adobe solution and finally found a good

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solution with Adobe. So we experimented with a number of other technologies for the last

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few years, honestly. We tried this with Swing. We tried this with Ajax component vendors.

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And had miserable performance and scalability issues with it in the past. And just due to

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the sheer volume of the thousands of trucks that we're trying to ship and the thousands

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of trucks that we're trying to track and the shipments that we're trying to track as well,

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just the amount of volume was too much for those frameworks to handle. And data services,

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lifecycle, and a lot of the other Adobe technologies, Flex and Specific, allowed for us to have a nice

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visualization of that that was effective.

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Given those requirements, I mean, what was it about lifecycle data services and Flex that

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fit it better than, say, like Swing or Ajax or something like that?

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Well, data management was a big part of lifecycle data services when we selected that. So being able

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to bind automatically to the client and bind automatically to other clients. So if you're

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an agent at Custom Critical and I'm an agent at Custom Critical and we're looking at the same

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shipment and you modify something or something in the field modifies it, the truck does something that

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causes a new state. Being able to see that in near real-time with very low latency was very important.

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So both from a data management and from a push, having a true push technology, which is something that's

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been absent in the past.

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Right.

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So the RTMP, the real-time messaging protocol, is provided and a true push protocol that's socket-based

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up to the client.

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Right, right. Versus like HTTP or something like that.

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And the server, the amount of data going back to the server is minimized. So it's an observer

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pattern. So the client just has an open socket and we push anything he wants to observe as

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it changes. So we're not killing our servers and we have a lot less server requirements as

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far as number of servers to support this.

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What was the development process like for when you, like you said, you went through several

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alternatives. And then when you did settle on using parts of the Adobe stack for it, like

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how long did that take and what was the process for doing it?

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It was fairly quick with the Adobe stuff. So I got hooked up with, you know, a couple

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folks at Adobe and we basically did a couple proof of concepts. And it was fairly quick

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and actually we did most of the work on our own. It didn't require a lot of Adobe assistance

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because it was pretty well documented. And we were able to go in there and test out the

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two major features that we were looking for. So the data management and the push technology.

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And honestly, we had had lots of experience trying it with other solutions.

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Right. So you had your requirements all figured out, essentially.

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Right.

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So it was pretty well defined and it was kind of like, well, we don't have this

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solution. Well, we still don't have a solution. And we came across Adobe and now we do have

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a solution.

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You guys are using this now and it's finished. And like, what are your plans for it in the

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future?

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To extend it. So, I mean, what we'll show you here is just the start of what we're going

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to do. So there's a lot of other areas that we're going to apply this to, not only just

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shipment tracking, but also how we do, how we price things to the customer, how do we analyze

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history, how do we analyze things over geography and time.

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So being able to reason both over space and time at micro and macro views.

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So I guess there's sort of new information about things you could sell your customers, to put

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it one way. But you have a new understanding of things, business practices that you were

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doing in the past that you can fine tune and make up new products and things to sell to

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them, right?

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Right.

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Yeah, actually some new revenue generating things that came out of this is our security

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surveillance. So being able to show our customer that, you know, we have a, almost like a network

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operations center, but we have a security operations center that's basically tracking these things

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to this detail. That puts a lot of ease to the customer's minds when they're shipping something

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very high value or something extremely sensitive, which is our specialty.

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Having talked about the demo so much, let's check it out.