Tal Saraf. (Via LinkedIn)

Tal Saraf, a veteran of Cisco, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, has joined Starbucks as its senior vice president of engineering and architecture, where he’s part of the effort to create what the coffee giant is calling its “digital flywheel.”

Saraf is working to hire developers, managers and directors to build out that initiative, which he said on his LinkedIn profile is meant to extend customer engagement through web and mobile experiences, supported by modern, scalable cloud platforms and integrated services.

Gerri Martin-Flickinger, Starbucks’ CTO, explained more about the project last week during Starbucks Investor Day. She said the flywheel has four components: a compelling program of rewards, simplified payment methods, personalization in the form of special offers, and quick, convenient order processes. The idea behind digitizing the flywheel, she said, is to present customers with “a user experience that’s the same everywhere,” regardless of where a store is located or whether it’s Starbucks-owned or just licensed or franchised, by means of a cloud-based “unified commerce platform.”

“Some of the logic that has lived on the point-of-sale or in back-office systems is being migrated to a cloud-agnostic solution that will let us move it globally, at scale, and have elasticity that we cannot get in our own data centers,” she said. All stores will put information on products, prices, inventory, location, hours, products sold and product costs into the platform, which will “provide an easy on-ramp” for new stores.

Japan will have the first company-owned and -operated stores to get the system, followed “very quickly by Germany as our first international licensed market.” By FY2019, 80 percent of Starbucks stores worldwide will have access to it, she said. Its construction is “really a key part of our aspirations.”

Starbucks declined this week to make Saraf available for an interview.

After earning both a bachelor’s degree in computer science and an MBA, Saraf worked at Microsoft for 16 years, serving in a variety of roles but spending the most time leading a team developing speech-based applications. At AWS he worked on the CloudFront content-delivery network and the Route 53 domain name service. Most recently, he served as VP of Cisco’s $1-billion Intercloud cloud-services offering. He joined Starbucks in October.

Saraf together with colleagues has more than 30 patents to his name.

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