Computerworld - February 27, 2012

of building everything internally with .Net, Business Objects and
Java. We bought a lot of servers, which is costly and makes it very
hard to make changes,” he says.
Now, by contrast, “we innovate by continuing to build strate-
gic relationships with Oracle and IBM. There are a lot of vendors
out there selling cloud and SaaS, but our strategy has been to
play with the big boys. I’m not one to jump into the cloud with
a midsize company,” Touey says. “If they really have something,
they’re going to be bought up by the big guys. You have to be very
judicious in terms of who
you pick as your partners.”
In contrast, Target CIO
Beth Jacob took a huge risk
in cutting ties with the giant
retailer’s big cloud provider,
Amazon, to build and launch
its new Target.com website
on its own technology.
“Given our size and scale
and that we want Target
users to have a consistent
experience, we made the
right decision,” she says.
“We put our No. 1 priority
— multichannel retailing
But that’s not to say it all
went flawlessly. In the first
few months after the new
site launched in August
2011, there were at least
three di;erent outages.
Yet, Jacob says the business
rewards of building and
hosting the site in-house far
outweigh the “early bumps
“We’ve built huge insight
into our capabilities and into
our guests, which are both
key to the future of multi-
channel retailing,” she says.

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