KRISH SRINIVASAN: Good afternoon.
I'm Krish Srinivasan.
I head the Cloud and Compute Organization at Target.
For those who shop at Target and for those who love shopping
at Target, I'm sure you know that we are all
about inspiration and joy.
And for those who don't know about Target,
we are one of the biggest retailers in the US,
across 50 states.
And I have a simple proposition that I want to start with.
Any organization that wants to serve its customers
or is thinking about customer satisfaction
has to think about inspiration and joy.
Now how many of us from an IT standpoint
think inspiration and joy?
At Target, we do.
Technology has been a key factor behind Target's growth
over the last few years.
And we are just getting started.
See it's even more critical because if your goal is
to be America's easiest place to shop,
technology becomes a foundational stone for us.
Now having said that, we know that our guests
have high expectations.
They want us to do well.
They believe in us.
They're rooting for us.
They want us to innovate.
And simply, they just want us to be Target.
So with all these high expectations,
how do we look up and out from a technology standpoint?
How do we make sure that we build the right platforms
and capabilities from an infrastructure standpoint,
so that we are ready for a future guest when they come up
with those new experiences, or when they're looking
for those new experiences?
And that's what I'm going to talk about today.
Last year our CIO Mike McNamara was at this very event.
And he shared the business strategy and the technology
transformation at Target.
As Mike stated, our strategy is indeed working.
And cloud is an enabler.
And thank you to Google for being
part of the journey as well.
In fact, this is our fifth straight year
where we are growing 25% year over year.
And I'm happy to say that last year was the first year where
we ran 100% of our Cloud Commerce workload
on Google Cloud Platform.
So Google, thank you for a flawless holiday
season in 2018.
Together, we came together, and we provided our guests
some phenomenal experiences.
Now what you see in the screen is
these are industry leading fulfillment services
for our guest.
And we're just adding on more and more to it.
Couple of examples, let's say you're at work,
and you want to make that order.
You are looking for something.
But you don't have the patience to wait for two days.
You have the capability now to make that order
online from your work and pick it up on your way back home.
What about this?
A busy mom, it's raining.
She has two little ones, little ones in her backseat.
And one of them is starting to throw some tantrums.
The other one's begin--
starts to begin to meltdown.
And I know some of us have been there.
She does not have to get out of her car.
And what we have done is we have given that mom the capability
to punch in that order, and when she drives
her car to the parking lot, our team members
get notified through a geo-location service.
And within two minutes, our store team members
will come and place the order in the car trunk.
And these are the experiences that we are
talking about in the future.
Now how did we get here?
I would say there are three foundational principles
at Target we believe in.
First, technology has to be experience focused.
Now what do I mean by that?
At Target, experiences takes first before technology does.
All of us have been an incident, outages and operational cause.
Something happens, we get on a call.
And this is where typical IT organization do,
there is a server failure.
There's a database failure.
Or some software developer over there
did a full table scan, brought out--
brought down an application.
At Target, we look at it a little bit different.
When we have an outage or an incident at Target, yes,
all of us do get on the call.
But the first question we ask is, what
is the impact to the guest?
What is the impact to the team member?
We understand that very clearly.
And then we talk about, what is the technical or technology
issues?
Second, architecture must be simple, elegant, and adaptive.
And what I mean by that is when we write applications
at Target, we want to make sure that we
don't have a vendor lock-in.
and there is this foundational principle
that platforms are the path to the future and not just tools.
And the third thing I would say is,
technology has to embrace cloud and open source, which
is why we went with Google.
Now we all know that cloud gives us
the speed and agility and elasticity and all
that good stuff.
But what about open source?
At Target, when we have a solution,
and we're looking for a solution for a problem,
the first thing we do is internally
look inside and see whether we can repurpose a solution
that we already have.
If for some reason that's not available,
we then go to the open-source community.
And we look at it.
And if for some reason that's not available,
we then go ahead and write it on our own,
even before we go to the vendors.
And the best part is, once we write it,
we contribute back to the open-source community.
So I talked about these high expectations earlier
that guests have in us.
They want us to do well.
They want us to be Target.
They want us to innovate.
This is where the next chapter of innovation
comes in that I talked about earlier, which
is all about focusing on our guest and our team members
in the future.
Be it a quart of milk, or that beautiful rug you're
looking at, or that perfect gift that you want for somebody,
Target is a positive force behind millions of people
in the US every single day.
Now we have about 30 million of our guests shop at our stores
every month, about 100 million visits in our digital fronts.
So to do this, we operate in at about 1,850 stores.
We have 29-- or 39 distribution centers.
We have our own two data centers.
And yes, we also have Google Cloud as well.
But-- and here's the challenge that comes in--
what if-- what if all these assets came together
seamlessly?
What if I could take a workload and just
deploy it across the board?
And what if I don't look at these 1850 stores as stores,
but I look at them as yet another extension of my cloud.
So tomorrow, I'm not going to have just GCP.
I may have 1,850 cloud environments,
just think about that power, and the capability,
and the scalability that we can get.
And what if there is a scenario where
I have five stores in New York, three stores in San Francisco,
I want to do two pilots the same day.
I get the results back.
And I pick one of them, because one has a better
experience for a guest.
And within a few hours, what if I can just
deploy to 1,850 stores across the hundreds of thousands
of devices that are running in those stores?
We have close to 130,000 Android mobile devices that
are running in those stores.
And what if I can do that seamlessly?
And here's the best part, what if I could do everything
that I said and still make the underlying
infrastructure completely invisible to our engineers?
So they are focused on what they're good at, which
is to write great software that can delight our guests
and make our team members happy.
They don't have to worry about the underlying technology.
They don't have to worry about patches, the version upgrades.
We take care of all of that.
And that's what we have been working on at Target.
Our engineers have been hard at work for the last 18 months,
building this platform at Target to solve this exact challenge
for the future.
Within Target we call it as TAP, or T-A-P,
which stands for Target Application Platform.
The mission of this platform is very simple.
It's to make Target the best place to write and deliver
software with zero touch infrastructure.
So in closing, I want to go back to my initial proposition
that I made, that any organization that
wants to provide great customer service
must focus on inspiration and joy.
Our guests get inspiration and joy
from our products and services, which they love.
And they're rooting for us.
Our store team members get inspiration and joy
by delivering those services to our guests.
Our technology team members get inspiration and joy
by building and innovating for the next set of experiences.
And that's the thing about inspiration and joy,
when it's going great, you get to renew it every single day.
And that's what we do at Target.
And we are just getting started.
Thank you, and have a wonderful conference.
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