Oracle Customer Spotlight Series
Starbucks selects technology to enhance customer connection and convenience
Starbucks’ technology transformation empowers employees and delights customers
Finding technology that nurtures the customer connection without getting in the way of the experience is what motivates Gerri Martin-Flikinger, the executive vice president and CTO of Starbucks. She’s led her group on a transformation and modernization journey that enabled the company to quickly pivot at the start of the pandemic. With increased agility, Starbucks was able to quickly spin up services to meet new customer requirements—including mobile order and pay, voice order, nationwide delivery, curbside pickup, and new drive-thru and pick-up locations.
At Starbucks, technology needs to bring more than just convenience to the customer experience. It must also nurture the experience and connection between the barista and the customer.Gerri Martin-Flickinger Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Starbucks
Hear Gerri explain the details of Starbucks’ digital transformation including
- Cloud-first technologies that enable scalability and resiliency
- Data exchanges that power real-time personalization and automation
- Microservices, event streaming, and blockchain to integrate physical and digital experiences
You’ll also learn the role Oracle applications—financials, supply chain, transportation, customer experience, and point of sales—play in Starbucks’ technology platform.
Event speaker
As executive vice president and CTO, Gerri Martin-Flickinger leads the global technology organization at Starbucks. She is the passionate leader behind the technology strategy that plays a critical part in propelling the Starbucks Mission forward—empowering partners and delighting customers, globally.
Upon joining Starbucks in 2015, Gerri led Starbucks Technology through a transformation into a best-in-class retail technology organization. Her globally respected team of technologists develops and enables industry-leading innovations including mobile order and pay, voice ordering, and social gifting. Her leadership helped establish a world-class data and analytics platform, enabling one of the first large-scale machine learning and personalization systems, Deep Brew. She and her team also modernized key business-critical platforms, unlocking iterative innovations at scale such as workforce management, supply chain planning, and store operation improvements. Her Starbucks Technology teams are known for their thought leadership; deep partnership with business teams; inspired use of emerging technologies such as AI, blockchain, AR/VR, and IoT automation; and well-architected, secure solutions.
Prior to joining Starbucks, Gerri was senior vice president and CIO at Adobe, where she led portions of their technology transformation to a cloud-based, subscription-services business. Before Adobe, she served as CIO of Verisign, MacAfee, and Network Associates and held numerous senior leadership roles at Chevron, where she began her career. Her breadth of experiences equip Gerri with broad technology industry insights and deep cybersecurity experience.
In 2015, the Silicon Valley Business Journal Bay Area named Gerri the Judges’ Choice winner in the Bay Area CIO of the Year awards for her role in Adobe’s successful shift to a cloud services company. She was also identified as a 2015 CIO Leader by HMG Strategy.
Gerri currently sits on the Charles Schwab Board of Directors and serves as a member of Arizona State University’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering Advisory Board, Sierra Ventures CIO Advisory Board, and the WSJ CIO Network. Her prior appointments include the Tableau Board of Directors from 2018 to 2019, before its acquisition by Salesforce.
Gerri holds a BS in computer science with honors from Washington State University.