- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer.
And today we're interviewing Jamie Cairns,
the chief strategy officer over at Fluent.
Jamie, welcome to the show.
Can you start by telling our audience
a little bit about Fluent and your role?
- Fluent is a Australian software as a service company,
we sell B2B predominantly for retailers
and direct to consumer brands.
And the area that we help them with
is management of inventory
which is the biggest challenge in retail today.
Fluent order management is the product
that we bring to market.
My role within the company is strategy officer
is kind of synthesizing the market requirements,
how we can set the standards in the market,
how we can build the right product
and work with our partners to deliver
really awesome experiences for clients.
- Thanks, Jamie.
And how has Fluent supported retailers to innovate
during a time when COVID has really impacted
a lot of consumers?
- Well, we've all been impacted significantly, haven't we?
And our clients saw huge changes
in unprecedented timeframes.
So going from having shops that were open
to walk in customers coming in and buying,
through a huge boom in online retail,
particularly contactless collections or deliveries.
And we saw a lot of our clients changing the mix
of their stores.
So using stores as many distribution centers,
doing contactless pick up, buy online pickup in store,
curbside pickup, and so forth.
So we were able to help them.
It really hadn't changed the message
that we were talking to most of our clients about anyway,
which was agility and flexibility
and the ability to adapt to changing consumer demands.
So it was certainly accelerated
but we've seen folks being able to rapidly adapt
by having a nice composable commerce ecosystem
being able to make changes on the plan.
- And Jamie, Fluent has been supporting global brands
such as L'Oreal, Ted Baker in London to name a few.
So how does AWS actually help you
to support these global customers?
- Well, first of all, what does those global customers
have in common, right?
They're complex, they have huge amounts of scale,
they're absolutely focused on their customers' experience.
So they're asking us to be able
to handle huge peaks in scale at holiday seasons,
to be able to handle the complexity
of inventory across different locations,
to be able to and make everything available
in the most convenient manner possible for their customers.
And AWS really helps us to be able to do that,
to be able to cost effectively deliver that scale.
So the benefits of software as a service
need to be underpinned by really powerful cloud computing.
And we're able to do that not only with AWS technology
but also with the assistance
of the AWS folks that we work with,
who brings some great experience also.
- Well, it's been really cool to see
how Fluent has leveraged AWS services
and specialist engagements to remain innovative.
And particularly what I wanted to chat to you about, Jamie
was with the use of the data lab.
So can you share a little bit more about this?
- So yeah, it's been a fantastic experience.
So one thing I think is really challenging
is to try and find people to work with
who really understand our space,
to really understand inventory.
There aren't very many people out there
that understand that space
and that know the challenges associated with it,
but also know how to be able to average AWS technology
to really see results and improvements
in the performance of what we do.
So what we were able to do was find somebody
within the AWS team who was able to help us
in that data lab.
We didn't need to spend a week
explaining to them what we do.
So we were able to get right into testing a hypothesis
that we had around how we could make really a step change
in the processing efficiency of inventory.
The number one challenge that our retailers face
is inventory management.
So we were able to do that in a very short timeframe,
prove the hypothesis out and we are straight into build.
So we were able to do that in a week long process
that without the combination of experience,
subject matter expertise and technical knowhow
we would to really struggle to get anywhere
near where we're at now in that sort of timeframe.
- It's been so cool to watch your business
utilize the retail competency program
as well within our APN and to witness all these
increased efficiencies as a result of the data lab.
So congrats on that.
It's been an awesome journey
and I mean, one week is so impressive as well.
Jamie, to round up this interview,
what kind of new technology
are you guys currently experimenting with
or wanting to see in the future?
- Yeah, predominantly it's around the big data processing
and data lake tools.
So things like S3, Eventbridge, Glue, Athena, Kinesis.
I think we've probably listed most of them there,
but that was really off the back of that data lab
and some of the work that we've been doing previously.
Also my SVP of engineering would kill me if I didn't mention
how excited he is about the Aurora Serverless V2
upcoming project.
We've seen some really great results
utilizing previous versions of that technology.
And just to round it out,
I mean, what we really need to be able to to handle
on what AWS really helps us with is peak scaling,
being able to handle the largest retailers
and brands in the world without any kind of downtime.
So all of those technologies allow us
to really fulfill that promise
and do it in a cost effective way.
- Thank you so much, Jamie, I personally love your company
because whenever I'm shopping online
you are the guys behind it
who's getting my goods to me quicker.
So thanks so much for making the processes
smooth for your customers.
And yeah, we really enjoyed partnering with you.
So if anyone has any questions,
please pop them in the comment section below
and we'll get back to you.
Thank you.
- Thanks having me, Aley.