by Peter High, published on Forbes
1-4-2016
Tom Reilly has had an illustrious career of joining high growth companies and putting them on a path to continued growth and significant events such as an initial public offering (ArcSight) and acquisition (ArcSight by HP and Trigo Technologies by IBM). For a little less than three years, Reilly has been the CEO of Cloudera. Reilly describes Cloudera’s business as developing “open-source software for a world dependent on Big Data. With Cloudera, businesses and other organizations can now interact with the world’s largest data sets at the speed of thought — and ask bigger questions in the pursuit of discovering something incredible.” With investments from the likes of Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, and Google Ventures, Cloudera has achieved a valuation of over $4 billion, allowing it to join the upper ranks of the so-called unicorns.
Among the largest unicorns, the CEO is typically a founder of the company. Tom is an exception to that rule, though co-founder and former CEO Mike Olson remains with the company as chief strategy officer. Reilly describes a productive relationship with the co-founders, and his goal of continuing their success. In this conversation, he also describes the future plans of the company, including speculation on the company’s public offering, the sectors they focus on, the methods he has used to attract and retain talent, and how he thinks about strategic planning in such a dynamic environment.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this podcast, please visit this link. This is the third interview with CEOs of the so-called “unicorns.” Past interviewees have included Sebastian Thrun of Udacity and Marc Lore of Jet.com. To read future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Cloudera is an organization that allows others to store, process, and analyze all their data all in one place, which has been a challenge that a lot of organizations have had in recent years. Could you talk a little bit about where the company stands now, its current iteration and evolution, and your current priorities and strategic plan.
Tom Reilly: Let’s talk about the initial value proposition. Traditionally, enterprises have always had a lot of data to grapple with and liked to have it all in one place, but it has become exacerbated in recent years because the world has become interconnected. There is a whole new set of data in volume and complexity that enterprises have not seen before. So our value proposition is to help enterprises and corporations capitalize on all this new data that is coming from the connected world. If they can get this new data they are going to have better understanding of their customers and will be able to service them better, they will be able to introduce new data-driven products and services, and increasingly we are seeing that they will leverage platforms such as ours in gathering more data to mitigate risk and address regulatory pressures. So the theme of that statement there is that our value proposition is to help enterprises transition and transform to this new, interconnected world, which is different in the last ten to fifteen years. That is why technology such as ours is of great interest to these enterprises.
Now what is different today than if you and I talked two years ago is that enterprises now understand the use cases they need to work on to maintain a competitive advantage in this connected world. We are seeing high value business applications come to market at a feverish pace, and that is what is exciting. Two years ago, I think people were still trying to understand: What does this connected world mean? How is it going to affect my industry? What are the technologies I have available to me? And we have seen a fast shift in the last two years to industries transforming.
High: I cannot help but thinking as you say that, Tom, that the path towards developing and combining all of one’s data in a single place is going to be much more complex for an older organization that has been gathering data for years – versus those newer organizations, digital native organizations, for instance, or those created in more recent times, where that complexity is not quite the same. Having collaborated with companies in both of those buckets, can you talk about the path towards success for one versus the other?
Reilly: I will frame it this way. There are what traditionally are called the Web 2.0 companies: the new, modern companies like Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Facebook. These enterprises are gathering data and using data to their competitive advantage and the core part of the services is why they are so successful. I think that a lot of what we are doing in this market that we call Big Data, or we like to think of ourselves as delivering the modern data management analytics platform, is to help traditional enterprises become more like those modern enterprises. The challenge traditional enterprises have is the different silos of systems. When they were doing automation twenty years ago, it was all process-centric, application-centric. Today we are helping them become more data-centric and more information-driven than more process-driven. That is our role in this. I often say we are helping traditional enterprises transition and look more like Google. If we can help them do that – whether it is an insurance company, retailer, bank, telecommunications company, or healthcare provider – and make them operate more like Google, Yahoo, or Facebook, they are going to be servicing their customers better, and are going to have more competitive products and services. There are just tremendous advantages.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
12-29-2015
There have been a lot of great stories on technology this year that track hot topics like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, self-driving cars, cybercrime, and the like. Each of these topics among others are covered in great depth in the stories that follow, which are my take on the top technology stories of 2015.
What Is Code? by Paul Ford in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, June 11, 2015
On June 11, 2015, Bloomberg BusinessWeek dedicated an entire issue to the topic of coding and its importance. This 38,000 word masterpiece was the most bought issue up to that point, and the online version has interactive elements so that the reader can actually code while reading the piece. Author Paul Ford is both a writer and a coder, but he has a special gift for making a seemingly esoteric topic accessible.
To hear the author and Bloomberg Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel talk about the article, watch this great interview by Charlie Rose.
The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence and The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction by Tim Urban in Wait but Why, January 22, 2015 and January 27, 2015, respectively
Artificial Intelligence is among the most written about topics today. Perhaps no one has written as cogently about the topic in the past year than Tim Urban on the long-form article site that he started called Wait but Why. Urban employs lucid storytelling and humor to provide the most comprehensive account of what Artificial Intelligence is and why it is so important.
12-28-2015
Like the rest of NetApp, Cynthia Stoddard’s IT team has been part of a major transformation at the company in recent years. Stoddard has been the Chief Information Officer of NetApp for nearly four years, and has helped evolve the “NetApp on NetApp” program such that IT tests products, processes, and procedures before customers, providing insights to the Engineering team, and allowing the IT team to be advocates on the company’s behalf with customers. Stoddard estimates that she spends roughly 30 percent of her time with customers. The combination of these activities have primed IT to become a source of innovation for the company, as well.
The NetApp Innovation Lab includes multiple people from IT who help test new technologies and think of new wrinkles to existing solutions. The team has generated significant value in this process.
Despite going through a trying transformation, the company continues to invest mightily in its people, providing technical and leadership training for those who seek it, ensuring that the next round of leaders of the company are groomed well in advance of their promotion.
(To read future articles like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with a discussion about NetApp itself. The company is obviously in the midst of a significant transformation. Could you let us know how things are, and IT’s role in that transformation?
Cynthia Stoddard: Within NetApp, and NetApp IT, we recognized, a few years ago, that cloud was going to be a key enabler and key building block to anything that we would do. We have built our infrastructure within IT to enable not only the flexibility and agility that the cloud brings, but also to contribute to showcasing our products. We have been a leader in the data management and storage space, but if you look at the cloud and what we have been doing within the cloud space, we have a vision for data fabric. What the data fabric does is allow you to connect your information between your on premise, cloud, and SaaS providers in a hybrid environment and maintain control and ownership of that information and that data. If you look at what we have done within NetApp, we are fully hybrid in our environment. We are able to host on premise traditional, on premise private cloud, public cloud, or hyperscaler. It is all tied together with our data fabric and with a series of orchestration tools that bring everything together. It is a unified view of data throughout all these environments that becomes powerful and helps enable the business to make the decisions and have the productivity that they need during business processes.
High: As you talk about topics that are relevant to the company, relevant to IT, and obviously relevant to your company’s customers, it brings to mind something I have heard you talk about, in the past, that you have been a proponent of NetApp on NetApp – the idea of the IT department becoming the first client of the organization. Can you describe how you have gone about that and the advantages that you have garnered as a CIO in a company that serves IT departments?
12-21-2015
CenturyLink’s Chief Information Officer Bill Bradley has been with the $18 billion company through predecessor organizations for more than 30 years. In that time, he has been a part of a technology organization that has gone from a support organization to a driver of innovation and digital transformation. Part of the change has been driven through job rotations, having non-IT employees spend time in IT and vice versa. IT has also championed agile development, engaging end users of technology early and often, validating value along the way. In a company that has grown dramatically through acquisition, Bradley’s organization is often one of the first to get involved when a company is acquired. In this interview, he describes a significant cultural transformation that he has led, and he describes specific innovations that have been developed.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future interviews like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your company, CenturyLink. Could you take a moment to describe the business?
Bill Bradley: We are a traditional network provider at our core, but we are much more than that. We offer video services, and voice services. Cloud and managed hosting are services that we recently added to our portfolio. Even more recently, we bought an analytics company, which will expand our IT services offering that has been in place for a little while. We operate both in the U.S. and internationally.
High: How would you describe your role in the organization?
Bradley: My responsibilities include all of the internal IT systems and platforms, and many of the business processes are encapsulated in those systems. We have grown by acquisition, so we have a significant number of systems that we use to support our business. We work to rationalize those over time. I also have a business leadership role with the rest of the CEO’s direct reports, which is involved in setting the strategic vision of the company.
Bloomberg.com discusses how Deutsche Bank AG is working to mesh and upgrade computer systems after a major acquisition
Edward Robinson and Nicholas Comfort
12-20-2015
Excerpt from the Article:
…Hammonds, who joined as chief information officer in November 2013, is surrounding herself with technology veterans. Last week, the bank announced that Pascal Boillat, the head of operations and technology at Fannie Mae, will join as CIO of the corporate and investment bank. In 2014, Hammonds hired Richard Shannon and Michael Grimaldi, both IT veterans who helped develop the risk management platform at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
The 48-year-old Hammonds, a University of Michigan graduate who also worked at Ford Co. and Dell Inc., will assume the role of chief operating officer next month and join the management board during 2016. She declined to comment for this article.
“Kim is a newcomer to financial services, but that means she can ask questions those on the inside might not think of,” says Peter High, the president of Metis Strategy LLC, a management consulting firm in Chevy Chase, Maryland, that focuses on the role of CIOs.
She plans to reduce the bank’s 45 operating systems to four, replace scores of outdated computers, and, in what may be the boldest move, shift thousands of applications and functions from the bank’s mainframes to cloud computing services managed by Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. The firms signed a 10-year, multi-billion dollar contract.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit Bloomberg.com
Peter High
12-18-2015
Chobani is the No. 1 Greek yogurt in the United States. Founded in 2005 by Turkish immigrant Hamdi Ulukaya, the company now has more than 1,200 employees. One year ago, Jindra Zitek was promoted to the position of interim-CIO at the company. He had been vice president of sales, marketing, business analytics and employee solutions within IT. Within a few months, he dropped the interim part of his title. As he discusses with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, as CIO, he is responsible for Chobani’s global IT strategy, delivery and support—namely technical services including network operations, help desk and cyber-security; applications, starting with the company’s ERP and other functional tools, as well as company-wide collaboration and productivity tools.
CIO Insight: You do not have a traditional educational background for a CIO, as you studied finance and economics as an undergraduate at the London School of Economics, and you received an MBA from Columbia University. You then worked as a consultant with McKinsey. How did your background in finance and as a consultant help you in your current role and how did you develop your technical skills?
Jindra Zitek: I believe my non-technical background in finance and consulting and project implementation experience from McKinsey actually helps me be an effective IT leader and partner for the business. At McKinsey, I specialized in business transformations, turnarounds and growth strategies. Across a number of industries (automotive, energy, health care, telecommunications), I experienced how technology and applications help businesses and individual functions unlock value—for example through increasing efficiency and consistency of business processes, or delivering insights and functionality that would otherwise not be possible (or with significant manual effort only). Being a business leader first enables me to identify where IT can deliver value and effectively communicate it to my business partners and then align on joint business/IT strategy and funding. My finance and McKinsey background drives me to look for clear benefits in each IT project at Chobani, and once we kick off a new project I ensure that we have clear accountability on both the IT and business side and measurable benefits milestones. As a rule, all of our projects have business sponsors to make sure we work on initiatives that matter to the business.
I am able to focus on the value to the business and prioritization thanks to our very strong IT leadership team who I focus on technical and applications-specific knowledge and skills. While I have not worked in IT directly previously, my relationship with IT and hardware goes back to my early teenage years when I started working part time at my dad’s business back in the Czech Republic-reverse logistics and repairs for end-user devices (printers, PCs, cell phones, cameras etc). In my current role, I am making sure that I leverage both McKinsey and TPG [private equity investor into Chobani] network of IT professionals.
CIO Insight: When you first took on the role of CIO, how did you organize yourself in the early days of this period? Were there changes to the IT strategy, to the organization structure, to processes, or to technologies that you implemented?
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
12-15-2015
Today, Pascal Boillat was named Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Head of Operations, Corporate & Investment Banking of Deutsche Bank. This is a newly created position that will have him reporting to Kim Hammonds who will become Chief Operating Officer of the company. These moves will be made official on January 1, 2016.
Hammonds said of Boillat’s hiring, “Pascal’s technical expertise and experience of implementing change across large teams will further strengthen our technology and operations leadership.”
Boillat is a long-time executive at Fannie Mae, where he has led a tremendous transformation, especially since the economic malaise that began in 2008. He rose from the CIO role to become the head of Operations and Technology in July of 2012. In his own description, Boillat’s responsibilities at Fannie Mae included being “responsible for day-to-day management of Operations & Technology and defining and implementing initiatives to ensure a safe & sound and sustainable mortgage finance industry.”
Boillat is a long-time financial services executive and consultant to the financial services space, having been a Managing Director at Citibank for four years from 2005 through 2009, where he was responsible for managing and delivering technology solutions for institutional, retail and prime brokerage operations. He was a Managing Director at BearingPoint prior to that.
Boillat has been commuting from New York to Fannie Mae’s headquarters in Washington, DC. He will remain in New York in his new post through 2016 after which point he will move to London.
12-14-2015
Few industries were hit as hard as financial services companies were during the economic crisis of 2008. Ally Financial was reborn during this period, having once been General Motors Acceptance Corporation, better known as GMAC. The company rebranded in 2010, and continued its historical focus on auto financing, but also reinvented itself as an online bank.
Michael Baresich joined the company as CIO in 2012, having been an IT executive at a variety of major financial services companies. At that time, the focus was still on cost cutting, as the its major shareholder at that time was the U.S. Treasury. He was also keenly aware that the company needed to prepare for growth, and he was one of several executives who helped with the company’s push into digital business. Even with the cost cutting imperative, he hired many web and mobile developers to ensure that the company was positioned for growth. As a result, Ally Financial is considered one of the digital disruptors in the financial services space.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 30th interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To listen with past interviews with the CIOs of P&G, Microsoft, CVS Caremark, and GE, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your company, Ally Financial. For those who might not be familiar with it, could you describe Ally Financial’s business?
Michael Baresich: Ally Financial might be best known via our bank subsidiary, Ally Bank. Ally Financial is a financial holding company that had its roots in GMAC, but has been a standalone company since 2006. We like to think of ourselves as having two killer apps. One is the auto finance business, where we are the largest dealer supported auto finance company in the United States. The other killer app is Ally Bank, which has won best online bank from Money Magazine five years running.
High: When you joined the company, like so many other financial institutions, it was a trying time. The organization was roughly 70 percent owned by the government. Could you talk a bit about IT’s role in getting the company back on a healthy footing without government assistance?
Baresich: From an IT perspective, we had two main goals. One was structural, and the other was financial/economic. With respect to the structural goal, from the business side there was a high degree of alignment and congruence between ourselves and our major shareholder – the U.S. Treasury. They wanted us to become independent, and we wanted to become independent of that ownership structure. The business had a clear focus on the need to restructure the company, sell certain assets, and restructure others. But, I would not say that the IT underpinnings of the company were top of mind.
As we began to think about selling off certain business units or separating from another, there were pretty profound IT implications that I discovered in the first couple weeks of my job in early 2012. Notably, most of the in-house managed IT assets – datacenters, and the expertise to run them – were part of business units that we were about to be separated from.
12-8-2015
Brian Lesser is the CEO of Xaxis, a billion dollar division within $16 billion WPP, a British multinational advertising and public relations company. Lesser has reached this revenue hurdle in less than five years, which has positioned Xaxis among the largest global digital media platforms. The company programmatically connects advertisers and publishers to audiences across all addressable channels. The company’s mission is to “make advertising welcome.” As Lesser notes, this involves advertising reaching the right customer at the right point in a transaction through the right medium with a compelling message. This is easier said than done, but the key to successfully execute this involves better leveraging data and technology.
Lesser highlights the many advantages and the challenges of starting a business within a much larger enterprise as opposed to doing so as a more traditional, venture-backed organization. It has required some cultural changes, but he has been blessed with a CEO who is progressive enough to understand that digital transformation that is necessary. As a result of Lesser’s success, in January he will be promoted to become North American CEO of WPP’s advertising media company, GroupM. This appears to be an acknowledgement that the things Lesser has done well at Xaxis should be embedded more broadly in the company as a whole.
Peter High: Brian, Xaxis is the biggest programmatic media company representing the demand side of the advertising marketplace. Please provide an overview of the business.
Brian Lesser: We started Xaxis about five years ago and the mission was to use data and technology to help advertisers reach and engage with their audiences across all channels and devices. Xaxis is a company that helps advertisers effectively engage with their audiences through the programmatic buying of media. What that means is that we can collect anonymous information about a consumer’s browsing behaviors – what content they like to read, what products they are shopping for, what ads they typically engage with. We gather that information and we build up profiles of users. Once we have those profiles, it means we can go into a marketplace for advertising impressions and enact those profiles in real time. When we see a user in one of these marketplaces or within inventory that we have forward traded or inventory that we own, we can evaluate how valuable that user is to one of our clients and then serve them an advertising impression—whether that be a banner ad, or a video ad, or a social media ad—in real time.
What programmatic advertising allows us to do is disconnect the audience from the context. In traditional media buying, you would define an audience based on the context they are in. So if I am looking for sports fans, I am going to buy sports programming on television or sports websites. Now, because I know so much about the user, I can disconnect that and I can serve relevant advertising to an audience wherever they may be regardless of the context that they are in. Today it is almost a $1 billion revenue business. We have 1,100 people around the world and over 2,000 clients that we service.
High: I was fascinated to learn that a mission of the organization is to make advertising welcome. How does one accomplish that?
Lesser: We fundamentally believe that technology and data can, over time, improve advertising—not just how ads are targeted to a person, but we think that, in general, people do not like interruptive advertising. But in many cases they are very happy to watch a 30 second television commercial if it is a beautiful piece of film and it is engaging and it is for a brand they are interested in. We think that using data and technology we can actually make advertising better for consumers and make advertising welcome for consumers. Because good advertising ceases to become an interruptive message and, in fact, becomes a relevant piece of content.
12-08-2015
Hunter Douglas is a global manufacturer of window coverings and architectural products. The company operates in more than 100 countries. The company has a reputation for developing innovative, high quality, proprietary products that can be found in millions of homes and commercial buildings. The company operates as a highly decentralized, global federation of small and medium-sized companies that manufacture and market similar products.
Rob Meilen has been North American CIO for more than four years. In this interview, he speaks with CIO Insight contributor Peter High about his strategic priorities, the decentralized nature of IT, his pursuit of mobile apps, his team’s path to innovation, and a variety of other topics.
CIO Insight: Please describe some of your strategic priorities for the foreseeable future.
Rob Meilen: Hunter Douglas North America is focused on maintaining our innovative product leadership, enhancing the experience of our customers, operating more efficiently. We are part of a recently created, executive IT steering committee to guide our project portfolio to match business and IT priorities. Our IT priorities include business process re-engineering and ERP optimization, customer-facing applications, improving master data management and partnering with product development teams on next generation window coverings.
CIO Insight: Your company is based in the Netherlands. How do you interface with the global IT team?
Meilen: Our company operates in a decentralized, federated model. I lead the HD North American IT organization. There are IT teams in other regions: Europe, Latin America, Asia and Austria. These teams operate largely independently and will periodically consult with each other. We do not have a global CIO or IT organization.
There is a periodic exchange of ideas among the CEOs and CFOs of each global region (North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia). These exchanges generally focus on product and supply chain topics. When the group sees technology opportunities, they will spur discussion between regional IT teams.
CIO Insight: Your team gets involved in mobile apps and the web, and therefore, you have reason to think about user experience and customer facing technology. What perceptions do you have about the changing demands of customers? What do they expect now when they interact with digital channels like the ones you provide?
