1-800-FLOWERS expanded its business from flowers to selling other items such as plants, gourmet foods, candies, toys, garden merchandise and gift baskets. The expansion also involved creating an online ordering system with Sun and AT&T technologies. At first online sales accounted for only ten percent of their business. Now online orders make up about half of their revenue.

1-800-FLOWERS had been using AT&T for its voice, data and IP requirements and decided to stay with them when they changed to 1-800-FLOWERS.COM. "And we have a history of success using Sun systems as the backbone of our infrastructure," said Ira Sheinwald, VP of IT Infrastructure at 1-800-FLOWERS.COM. "But beyond the strengths of each company's individual product and service offerings, the teamwork between AT&T and Sun was instrumental in getting our transaction processing sites up and running across the country," he said. "Together, they gave us the skill levels and the extension of our own competencies to position us for more growth."

AT&T Internet Data Centers host the 1-800-FLOWERS.COM service delivery infrastructure. For back-end processing, clearing and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, they use Sun FireTM 4800 servers and Sun FireTM 6800 servers, running the SolarisTM Operating Environment (Solaris OE). Sun FireTM V880 servers provide scalability for application servers; Sun EnterpriseTM 280R servers and NetraTM servers deliver front-end Web and firewall services for better load balancing and security; and SunTM ONE Web Server software (formerly iPlanetTM Web Server) is being used to upgrade existing BEA and NetscapeTM Web server software.

"Our objective is zero downtime," said Enzo Micali, Chief Technology Officer, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM "Sun and AT&T are helping us achieve that -- with everything from local redundancy, failover capabilities, hot spares and high-end RAS features to business continuity planning. Today we can actually lose one of our four sites and still run the company -- with no loss of performance experienced by customers or florists who are using our Web applications."

AT&T's managed hosting services are certified via the SunToneSM Initiative and meet the most stringent quality standards, as defined by industry best practices and processes for deploying and managing high-quality network services and higher volumes of online transactions and, ultimately, increased customer satisfaction.

Sun Services consultants have worked with AT&T and 1-800-FLOWERS.COM staff on capacity planning, environmental audits and performance tuning, helping to optimize the environment and minimize resource costs.

The online expansion offers customers more choices and enables 1-800-FLOWERS.COM to handle busy holidays such as Valentine's Day or Mother's Day. "Between our call centers and our Web applications, we process upward of 150,000 orders per day for several days in a row, working with more than 2,000 florists. So we need an infrastructure that can go from x to 10x on the fly, without a glitch. Sun and AT&T give us that capability," said Enzo Micali. [...read more...]

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