It’s a complex world of technology, retail alliances with one thing for certain in an uncertain age: agility, computing power, and an eye for innovation, wins. My guest on this episode is Tom Litchford, Head of Worldwide Retail at Amazon Web Services (AWS), a technology that bring the computing horsepower and flexibility to business around the world - but you probably already know that. What you might not know is how AWS fits into the overall Amazon eco-system, and how they are now becoming a strategic vendor to retailers like Best Buy who put aside their traditional competitive frameworks and partner with some of the world’s most powerful computing offerings to drive business results.
Welcome to the The Voice of Retail , I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada.
It’s a complex world of technology, retail alliances with one thing for certain in an uncertain age: agility, computing power, and an eye for innovation, wins.
My guest on this episode is Tom Litchford, Head of Worldwide Retail at Amazon Web Services (AWS), a technology that bring the computing horsepower and flexibility to business around the world - but you probably already know that.
What you might not know is how AWS fits into the overall Amazon eco-system, and how they are now becoming a strategic vendor to retailers like Best Buy who put aside their traditional competitive frameworks and partner with some of the world’s most powerful computing offerings to drive business results.
Thanks for tuning into this special episode of The Voice of Retail. If you haven’t already, be sure and click subscribe on your favourite podcast platform so new episodes will land automatically twice a week, and check out my other retail industry media properties; the Remarkable Retail podcast, the Conversations with CommerceNext podcast, and the Food Professor podcast. Last but not least, if you are into Barbeque, check out my all new YouTube barbecue show, Last Request Barbeque, with new episodes each and every week!
I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company & Maven Media, and if you’re looking for more content, or want to chat follow me on LinkedIn, or visit my website meleblanc.co! Have a safe week everyone!
About Tom Litchford
As head of worldwide business development for the retail industry, Tom Litchford leads and manages AWS' industry strategy including marketing and sales enablement, channel development, and solution offerings required to address customers' business requirements and challenges.
Litchford has more than 35 years of experience in systems engineering, sales, product management and marketing of technology business solutions for the retail and hospitality industries. Prior to joining AWS in 2017, most recently he led the National Retail Federation's (NRF) technology communities and its cybersecurity program. Prior to NRF, he served in various roles with notable technology firms including Microsoft and NCR.
Litchford was instrumental in driving the development of the OPOS application program interface (API) set – now a defacto industry standard for point-of-sale application-to-peripheral connectivity. Working with organizations such as ARTS and NAFEM, he has also been influential in establishing XML messaging standards in the retail and foodservices sectors.
About Michael
Michael is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice. He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career. He has delivered keynotes, hosted fire-side discussions with C-level executives and participated on thought leadership panels worldwide. Michael was recently added to ReThink Retail’s prestigious Top 100 Global Retail Influencers for a second year in 2022.
Michael is also the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts, including Canada’s top retail industry podcast, The Voice of Retail, plus the Remarkable Retail with author Steve Dennis, Global E-Commerce Tech Talks and The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois. Most recently, Michael launched Conversations with CommerceNext, a podcast focussed on retail eCommerce, digital marketing and retail careers - all available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music and all major podcast platforms. Michael is also the producer and host of the “Last Request Barbeque” channel on YouTube where he cooks meals to die for and influencer riches.
Michael LeBlanc 00:04
Welcome to The Voice of Retail. I'm your host, Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada.
Michael LeBlanc 00:10
It's a complex world of technology, retail alliances but one thing for certain in an uncertain age, agility, computing power, and an eye for innovation wins.
Michael LeBlanc 00:21
My guest on this episode is Tom Litchford, Head of Worldwide Retail at Amazon Web Services, a technology that brings computing horsepower and flexibility to businesses around the world, but you probably already know that.
Michael LeBlanc 00:33
What you might not know is how AWS fits into the overall Amazon eco-system, and how they are now becoming a strategic vendor to retailers like Best Buy who put aside their traditional competitive frameworks and partnered with some of the world's most powerful computing offerings to drive business results.
Tom Litchford 00:50
Strategic collaboration that we have with Best Buy, you know, again, is, is you know, as their preferred cloud provider for their cloud infrastructure services, as well as their strategic partner for developing engineering talent, which, you know, as you can imagine, is huge. Across, I think it's across all industries, not just retail.
Michael LeBlanc 01:12
Let's listen in now.
Tom, welcome to The Voice Retail podcast. How are you doing?
Tom Litchford 01:17
Doing great. Nice to hear your voice, Michael.
Michael LeBlanc 01:20
Yeah, well, this is not the first time we've had the pleasure of speaking together. You were Steve and I's guests on Remarkable Retail a couple of months ago, it was great to meet you. And, and you got some big news. So, I thought what a great opportunity to get you on, on The Voice of Retail. So, thanks for joining me.
Tom Litchford 01:36
Yeah, absolutely, I appreciate you having me back.
Michael LeBlanc 01:39
Yeah, where are we finding you today?
Tom Litchford 01:42
Well, I'm, I'm in Virginia today. We're, we're still somewhat locked down. Most of retail is still not back into their headquarters yet. So, -
Michael LeBlanc 01:53
Yeah, yeah.
Tom Litchford 01:54
We're still doing a lot of virtual work. But slowly getting back out there into the traveling world.
Michael LeBlanc 02:00
Yeah, you've got a global mandate. So, it's, it's a different way, I'm sure, we've talked about it before, but it's a different way of doing business. Now are you starting to go to some of the some of the trade shows, are you getting on the road a little bit for that? What's your perspective around traveling to different shows?
Tom Litchford 02:16
Yeah, I think I mean, we're, we're constantly evaluating that. I mean, I think you probably saw that we, unfortunately, we’re not in person at the recent NRF as much as we wanted it to be.
Michael LeBlanc 02:27
Yeah.
Tom Litchford 02:28
But that was due obviously to, to the pandemic, and, and just the fact that we want to keep our employees, customers and partners safe. And, you know, -
Michael LeBlanc 02:38
Yeah.
Tom Litchford 02:38
With the data we had there,we just felt it wasn't the right time. But, you know, I, I just saw, saw this morning, though, the numbers are actually starting to look positive for a change.
Michael LeBlanc 02:47
Yeah.
Tom Litchford 02:47
And you know, and hopefully, we'll have this in our rearview mirror here, in the next month or so.
Michael LeBlanc 02:53
Yeah, I look, I look forward to being and saying the post-COVID era and having it like, -
Tom Litchford 02:58
Oh my gosh.
Michael LeBlanc 02:58
Really post-COVID era, right?
Tom Litchford 03:00
I think we all do.
Michael LeBlanc 03:01
Well, all right. Well, we kind of jumped right in and, and it's interesting, I mentioned, you mentioned NRF, because in your background, you, you were at NRF. But why don't we take a step back, tell the listeners about yourself a little bit about your background and your role at Amazon AWS?
Tom Litchford 03:15
Sure. Oh, gosh, yeah, I'm a, I'm a 40 plus year career guy now, you know, I think I probably mentioned this to you last time, you know, retail kind of gets in your blood. It's an incredible industry to work for just, you know, totally different challenges every day when you wake up to, to deal with. It just makes it fascinating and, and challenging.
Tom Litchford 03:38
But with that, yeah, you know, I started my career, right out of school with NCR and then took on a role at Microsoft, and then back to NRF, like you mentioned, and then AWS enticed me about four years ago, to come help them build their, their retail verticals. So, I'm the global lead for retail and wholesale distribution here at AWS.
Michael LeBlanc 04:01
And what a ride that's been, we're going to talk about it not just for AWS but, oh well, really, they're the creator in, in many ways, with cloud computing and the whole, the whole rewiring in some ways. I mean, you know, with your great experience, you, you know, starting at NCR, that's a different company now too, right. So, it's such a, you know, these, these icons of retail have gone through such change.
Michael LeBlanc 04:22
Let's talk about AWS. I mean, there's no one listening to this, who wouldn't be familiar with Amazon, it might be customers, they might trade on them. Congratulations, by the way on, on the recent numbers from last week. They were just blockbuster congratulations on that, fantastic numbers, -
Tom Litchford 04:37
Thank you.
Michael LeBlanc 04:38
But let's talk about AWS. So, you know, let's make sure there's a level playing field. It's three letters of the alphabet, but it's so much more. So give us a bit of an origin story about how this AWS came to be, what it stands for, and a bit of the scope and the scale of the, of the business.
Tom Litchford 04:55
So, AWS is Amazon Web Services. So, it's a business unit of Amazon, most people I think, understand now Amazon has several business units that they work with different customers around the world. But we're, we're just over 15 years old now and, and AWS was the kind brainchild of Andy Jassy who is now Amazon's CEO. And,
Michael LeBlanc 05:21
He's for himself. He, he's done well for himself.
Tom Litchford 05:24
Yeah, well, you know, again, I think at the time, you know, his role was developing technology services for then the amazon.com business. And, and I think he had the vision that saw that, hey, I could take these types of services I’m providing to this customer amazon.com and provide them to customers around the world that need these types of technology services.
Tom Litchford 05:50
So, you know, with that, AWS has grown to be the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offerings. I think with the last re-invent here in December, we're now you know, well over 200 fully featured services, whether that's around compute storage, databases, networking, analytics, 20 plus years of leadership and machine learning and AI, heavy into Internet of Things and robotics, as you might imagine, with them, fulfillment centers, mobile security, virtual augmented reality, I could go on and on. But, -
Michael LeBlanc 05:56
Yeah, yeah.
Tom Litchford 06:02
You know, again we, we deploy those across the world, globally, through 26 geographic regions. So, across what we call availability zones. So 84 availability zones within those regions. And, and I think we just announced 24 more coming online here pretty soon, in Australia, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, UAE and, and Canada. So, -
Michael LeBlanc 06:55
You got a, you got a broad remit. My goodness, -
Tom Litchford 06:57
Yeah, yeah.
Michael LeBlanc 06:58
That's a big broad remit now, I, I don't want to call it the legend, but the, as I understand it, maybe you, you would, and of course you would know better that's it, it, the search, or what created AWS, was really the search for enough computing power to handle the fast-growing Amazon business. And its kind of was like, we, we can't go out and find anywhere so, typical Amazon, we're going to create it. Is that, is that a fair representation of the story behind AWS?
Tom Litchford 07:24
No at the time, I mean, they were they were still, you know, using all sorts of services. But again, Andy, Andy was then, you know, providing, you know, in terms of IoT services, the power to run a business like amazon.com. -
Michael LeBlanc 07:40
Yeah, yeah.
Tom Litchford 07:41
And again, I think the vision that he saw there is the, you know, the way these services were set up, that, that you could architect them in such that they could serve multiple customers around the world. And, and when you look at the business model from doing that, you know, we see customers as, as they're running their systems on-prem today, are saving anywhere from 30 to 50%, to move those into a cloud based services and architectures, you know, which then allows them to take, take those savings and invest them more in driving innovation for their company.
Michael LeBlanc 08:19
And, and to be clear on the business model the, the breakthrough it is basically that you, you pay for what you need versus, you know, buying extra like that's, that's it's kind of a pa-, I wouldn't say pay as you go. But that was one of the business model innovations really, behind AWS, yeah?
Tom Litchford 08:34
Right. Yeah, and, and you know, I mean, I'll give you a specific example, in retail, that's just, you know, a classic, what I would call low hanging fruit is, you know, take eCommerce platforms, you know, today, you know, I've, I've made the comment before that, you know, when it comes to provisioning an eCommerce platform on-prem, it's extremely difficult to do to where, you know, that systems not sitting there idle most of the year, and then overtaxed in the holidays, is, -
Michael LeBlanc 09:02
Right.
Tom Litchford 09:02
As we saw these past holidays, well, what the cloud does is, you know, with features such as auto scaling, you know, it can see the volume ramping up coming in, and it will ramp up the available resources to deal with that volume. And then when the volume goes back down, it, it settles back down the available resources. And as you just said, you're only paying for those resources while they're being used.
Tom Litchford 09:24
Well, I was going to say another then we even pioneered and innovated on top of that into architectures that we call micro-services, that now you're literally only paying for the time when the code is running, right. Not so your, so, even if you had like an easy to compute instance sitting there, it could still be idle at times that you're paying for. Whereas in a micro-service environment, you're just paying for the time that code runs. So, our customers are seeing another, you know, 30 to 50% savings on top of the 30 to 50% they got when they moved it to the cloud to start with.
Michael LeBlanc 09:58
Now, last question about, about AWS structurally, because I'm just genuinely curious, of course, when we say the cloud things aren't up in the sky floating above our heads. So, you, you have physical facilities kind of around the world, I imagine that, you know, colder places and warmer places for cooling. Is that, again, is that a fair representation? I mean, let's talk just for a minute about the physicality of AWS.
Tom Litchford 10:22
Yeah, well, it's like I said, we have 26 geographic regions around the world. And within each region, we have what we call availability zones, of which there are 84. So, at least a region, at least has two availability zones, many times more than that, in terms of, you know, reliability for performance.
Michael LeBlanc 10:45
Right, right on.
Well, one of the things that brought us back together today was this business deal you did with Best Buy, and I want to get to that, I want to get, hear all about that in a minute. But as we did actually on Remarkable Retail, the first time we talked about it, I wanted to talk about kind of the competitive nature of retail. You've you described to me as the, ‘Big thud’, in the, in the sales process, where you say, well, am I not supporting what is ostensibly my competitor when I do with, when I do a deal with AWS? So, clearly Best Buy saw beyond that. But take me through, and take the listeners through, you know, when you're asked that, or when you're talking about that, how you position that or how it's understood by customers and prospective customers.
Tom Litchford 11:28
Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think I, I think I've mentioned to you that that is a perception that we deal with in the industry today. But you know, I also probably told you, again, we work with 1000s of customers around the world. But you know, when you think about it too, I think as, as more and more retailers start to understand the value that Amazon can bring to their business, not just AWS, they really start to understand how we can help them grow their business.
Tom Litchford 11:56
So, by that, you know, what I mean is, if you think of AWS today, we are an IT services provider, but from an Amazon perspective, we not only provide that, but we also provide logistical services. That's where you see things like the hub and lockers. We provide distribution services through like the Amazon marketplace or using services like Pay. (crossover talk) We have, you got Fulfillment by Amazon on the logistic side, you have Amazon Advertising now helping, helping customers grow their business through that, that route. So, -
Michael LeBlanc 12:32
Wow, what, what numbers the first time we saw the numbers. -
Tom Litchford 12:34
Yeah.
Michael LeBlanc 12:34
I just got to (inaudible) the numbers, because it's the first time, -
Tom Litchford 12:36
Yeah.
Michael LeBlanc 12:37
we've seen numbers, what was it, 31 billion? And, -
Tom Litchford 12:39
Yeah, (crossover talk).
Michael LeBlanc 12:40
I mean, that's, -
Tom Litchford 12:40
Yeah.
Michael LeBlanc 12:41
Huge, right? You're like, you know, from, It's funny, when, when people think of Amazon, the average, the average consumer, the average, they don't think of this, this platform that is now such a complex and interesting hybrid of a business, right?
Tom Litchford 12:55
Yeah, so, it's not, it's not just Amazon, the retailer, think of Amazon as, as kind of a holding company that has all sorts of services that can help retailers grow their business. And, you know, when it comes specifically to AWS, you know, I think, I think customers choose AWS, because of our retail heritage. I mean, our consumer business is a large customer of ours. We treat them just like any other customer, they leverage our services, and they provide feedback to us to help us improve those offerings, which ultimately benefit all of our customers.
Tom Litchford 13:29
And when you think about it, you know, just, just think I was thinking about Amazon Prime Day last year, when you look at these services, and think about them from a retail harden perspective, just on Prime Day 2021, last year, a service called CloudFront, itself would had peaked at over 290 million HTTP requests per minute. On Amazon Aurora database process, 233 billion transactions, and the DynamoDB service handled 89 million requests per second. So, those are the types of, you know, what I would call retail hardened services, because of that relationship I have with Amazon retail, that, you know, makes us unique to the industry in terms of providing cloud services.
Tom Litchford 14:19
And the other half of that is the innovation that we drive in the industry. You know, you know, I think I talked to you before about how we're always working backwards from our customers perspective. And when you look at some of those purpose-built services, such as Amazon Personalize, which is that you know, (inaudible) recommendations engine on amazon.com, or Amazon Forecast, which is the AI, ML algorithms for how they do demand forecasting. Amazon Connect, which is the call center, or fraud detector on how we, you know, detect fraud on the web. All of these innovations that we have developed on, on that side of the business we make available to all of our customers. So, so, there's just example after example of how, you know, customers are choosing AWS because of that innovation technology that we bring to them and help them provide the best experiences for their customers.
Michael LeBlanc 15:14
Well, you touched on a few, it's kind of a good segue into my kind of a shorter question is, is the benefits of AWS. I mean, when you roll it all up, what is it that retailers are finding most competitive? If the security, the AI, the analytics, the horsepower is, is that what CIOs are finding the most competitive? I guess it's the bundling of things that you just talked about, right? All put together, but is there any one that stands out as in, this is the one you know, I start this first, I want, I want to make sure I don't have to worry about security the way I used to, because, -
Tom Litchford 15:45
Yeah.
Michael LeBlanc 15:45
I think you guys will take it is that, or is it just a bundle of all those things grouped together?
Tom Litchford 15:49
You know, I think it's a combination, when, when you look at the 1000s of retailers across the world that we work with, you know, we've, we've worked across all retail segments. You know, by that I mean things like food and drug or general merchandise, specialty retailers, pure play digital retailers.
Tom Litchford 16:07
And, and Michael, we've done just about every imaginable workload you can think of out there and, you know, giving you some examples of, you know, for example, Brooks Brothers, we literally pioneered and innovated how you run these large SAP complex systems in the cloud, or, you know, at Under Armour, you know, we power their mobile app, which now has over 160 million customers using that app, or you know, at Neiman Marcus, you know, it was it was a, it started with more of a kind of mainframe migration discussion that drew into a customer data platform discussion, which then grew into, because of the pandemic, how do I, you know, get that one on one relationship that customers experienced in my stores, to kind of mimic that in a mobile environment?
Tom Litchford 16:57
Or, you know, going across the pond to Sainsbury's started with that example I gave you, you know, getting that eCommerce platform into the cloud. But then it was, well, let's retire our Oracle RAC system to, I don't know if you saw the announcement last month, they're now going to deploy Amazon JWO technology for their self, or checkout free stores, right?
Michael LeBlanc 17:20
Right, right.
Tom Litchford 17:20
So again, (crossover talk), -
Michael LeBlanc 17:22
Just Walk Out for the listeners who may not know the, -
Tom Litchford 17:24
I'm sorry, yes, Just Walk Out technologies.
Michael LeBlanc 17:26
I liked I, I've called it, ‘Shop it like you stole it’, but you probably don't want me to describe it that way. Let's talk, let's talk about Best Buy. Let's talk about this tie up with Best Buy. Big announcement last week and it caught me, I wouldn't say caught me by surprise, but certainly caught my attention. I mean, Best Buy and, and Amazon, in many worlds compete aggressively against each other yet, there's a tie up here. I guess back to your point about the, the services. Tell me about the deal, how it came together and, and what you're doing for our friends at Best Buy?
Tom Litchford 17:54
Yeah, so exciting, exciting deal. It's basically just deepening the relationship that, that we've already had together as partners across AWS, as well as other services. You know, I, I think what makes it a little more unique is Best Buy is also known for their culture of innovation and use of technology to better serve their customers. And a, you know, a great example of that was just how quickly they deployed in the industry leading curbside pickup experience when the pandemic hit. I think they were able to, you know, packaging and get something out there in, in less than two days to start serving their customers better.
Tom Litchford 18:35
So, this, the strategic, strategic collaboration that we have with Best Buy, you know, again, is, as you know, as their preferred cloud provider for their cloud infrastructure services, as well as their strategic partner for developing engineering talent. Which, you know, as you can imagine, is huge across, I think it's across all industries, not just retail, but you know, (crossover talk), -
Michael LeBlanc 19:00
Speak more about that, what does that mean, unpack that one a little bit for me?
Tom Litchford 19:04
Yeah, so, so, I mean, what it really comes down to is if you're going to attract, you know, by engineering talent, I'm talking about IT engineers, right, IT professionals, you know, these, these folks want to work for, you know, the state of the art technologies that are out there.
Tom Litchford 19:21
And so, by partnering with, Best Buy partnering with AWS and us partnering with them to get their people trained, we're providing them an opportunity to, to really solidify, I think you, you probably saw they, they were recently announced as part of Fast Company’s, ‘Best places to work’, and they just want to continue to expand on that in terms of attracting the best engineering talent in, in IT to do that. So, we're going to work with them to get these people trained on cloud technologies.
Michael LeBlanc 19:52
Now is this a, you know, as you know, this is a Canadian primarily podcast. Does this cover the Canadian businesses? Is this everywhere where Best Buy operates, speak to that a little bit.
Tom Litchford 20:02
Yes. So, so again, the, the, the cloud infrastructure side of that partnership is to move their data centers and core enterprise applications into the cloud. But in terms of, of across what businesses, where that's something you should probably talk to Best Buy about.
Michael LeBlanc 20:21
All right, so they'll figure that out, but basically you got a strategic partnership that keeps growing. So, clearly, they're happy with the outcome, right? It is, -
Tom Litchford 20:22
Right.
Michael LeBlanc 20:23
Basically what, what we, what we saw there. Well, you spent a lot of time with retailers, listening and advising, you know, they tap into your depth of experience and, and all the resources you bring. So, I want to do the same thing, I want to tap into your insights. Advice to the retailer's listening, two starts and one stop based on everything that's happened over the past COVID era, or whatever, the past couple years, and what you think, collectively as an organization is going to happen over the next, you know, year or years to follow. So, two starts, what they should start doing, and one thing they should stop doing, based, -
Tom Litchford 21:04
Yeah.
Michael LeBlanc 21:05
Based on your experience.
Tom Litchford 21:06
Yeah, and, and you know, I think I think it goes beyond just looking at, you know, coming out of the pandemic, what's hot, what's not this and that. I mean, obviously, we know we've got supply chain issues to fix. We know, we still got, you know, customer experiences, things to do, we've got to get rid of channels and become more agnostic to how we look at our customers.
Tom Litchford 21:27
But, you know, if, if I were to, to give at least, at least some broader advice to, to retailers and, and customers across all industries, is I would probably, I'll start with a stop, why don't we stop this inward and competitive focus and, and start really getting more customer focused. Really listening to what those customers are asking you for.
Tom Litchford 21:50
And then the second start would be, make sure you have the capabilities to address what they're asking for an experiment, experiment, and experiment. And that's the only way I think, you know that we're going to be successful over the course of time here.
Michael LeBlanc 22:07
Well, I've, I've talked to a lot of retail CEOs who said, ‘I don't know what's coming next. But I know I need to build my organization for agility’, right. Would you agree? I mean, basically, there's no way to predict, you know, no way to predict what we've gone through and there's no way to predict what happens next. So, you better be more agile, would, -
Tom Litchford 22:24
Yeah.
Michael LeBlanc 22:25
Would say that’s, that’s a popular, (crossover talk), -
Tom Litchford 22:27
Yeah, and take, take that agility and start experimenting, you know, if you, you know, I always, always argue, you know, your employees have some of the best ideas in the world for how to serve your customers better. So, why don't we listen to them? And why don't we, you know, get this culture of innovation, and culture of experimentation, and then just have a relentless focus on removing friction from the experience that they have with you as a brand? And, I think over the course of time, you're going to win the loyalty of those consumers.
Michael LeBlanc 22:58
All right, well, listen, this has been great. Now, where can, you no doubt have lots of things to say as an organization somewhere, somehow and probably you, is a way to get in touch with you. Where can people go to learn more or get in touch with you?
Tom Litchford 23:11
Yeah, absolutely. I, you, you know, I love talking to customers day in and day out and would welcome them to just email me directly if they like to do that. It's t litch, t-l-i-t-c-h@amazon.com. Or go to our website, aws.amazon.com/retail. And there you'll you can find about all sorts of things around customers we're working with and the types of workloads and innovations we're driving with them.
Michael LeBlanc 23:38
All right, well, very good. Well, Tom, it's such a treat to get you back on the mic again. You know, again, to share your insight, tap into your insight for the audience. I thank you for, for being and joining me on The Voice of Retail. And I wish you continued success and, and safe travels when you get back, back on the road with your big global arena.
Tom Litchford 23:56
Yeah, absolutely Michael, great to hear your voice again and, and I look forward to seeing you here in the near future.
Michael LeBlanc 24:02
Thanks for tuning in to this special episode of The Voice of Retail. If you haven't already, be sure and click and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so new episodes will land automatically, twice a week. And check out my other retail industry media properties the Remarkable Retail podcast, Conversations with CommerceNext podcast and The Food Professor with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois.
Michael LeBlanc 24:22
Last, but not least, if you're into barbecue, check out my all new YouTube barbecue show, Last Request Barbecue with new episodes each and every week.
I'm your host Michael LeBlanc, President of M.E. Leblanc & Company and Maven Media. And if you're looking for more content or want to chat, follow me on LinkedIn or visit my website at meleblanc.co.
Have a safe week everyone.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
AWS, retail, customers, Amazon, services, business, world, retailers, technology, partnering, innovation, cloud, pandemic, industry, talk, engineering talent, listening