Asia Miles was established as a loyalty program under Cathay Pacific 20 years ago. Though it is still owned by Cathay, Asia Miles now partners with a great number of airlines as well as through an ecosystem of partners to add value to frequent travelers with different ideas of what a great loyalty program should yield.

Michael Yung is the Head of Digital Product and Technology at Asia Miles, and over the past five years, he has helped grow the company, and to help it continue its evolution to become a digital leader in the loyalty space. He explains the evolution of the company from largely a call center-based business to one that services customers across a wide array of digital formats. He describes the different types of customers Asia Miles serves. Yung also talks about the diverse team he has built. Lastly, he details his team’s creative use of blockchain for marketing campaigns using smart contracts. I caught up with Yung recently at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, and covered all of these topics and more.

(To read future interviews like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)

Peter High: Please provide a brief overview of Asia Miles’ business.

Michael Yung: Asia Miles is the loyalty rewards program of the Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific Airways. Similar to any loyalty rewards program, our members can earn miles by flying, traveling, shopping, dining, or even by having a mortgage with our banking partners.Our members can redeem points for many rewards such as hotel stays or laptops. We set up our program in 1999, so we are celebrating our 20th anniversary this year. Over the 20 years, we have accumulated over 11 million members, we have about 700 partners around the world to serve those members, and we are the leading loyalty program in Asia.

6/11/18
By Peter High, Published on Forbes

Mickey Boodaei has been a leading entrepreneur in the security space for years. He co-founded Imperva, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011, and he co-founded Trusteer, which was sold to IBM for $1 billion in 2013. Soon after the latter acquisition, he founded Transmit Security.

Interestingly, Boodaei did so without seeking venture capital. He indicated that by putting his own money (and that of co-founder Rakesh Loonkar) into the start-up, it felt more like when he founded his first firms, but in this case, there was no one else to answer to.

Transmit Security provides, “a cross-channel identity platform that is designed to simplify, accelerate, and reduce the cost of identity-related projects,” as Boodaei explains. He also notes that “security and customer experience are the two most important goals of any organization today. We bundle these together and address them as a single challenge.” In this interview, he explains his personal journey as a CEO, the importance of a strong co-founder, and his opinions on the evolving threat landscape.

Peter High: You are the Chief Executive Officer of Transmit Security. Can you provide an overview of the company?

Mickey Boodaei: We founded [the company] four and a half years ago with the goal of building a cross-channel identity platform that is designed to simplify, accelerate, and reduce the cost of identity-related projects. These include projects such as authentication, authorization, fraud prevention, account opening, among others. Our R&D Center is in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the rest of our technical teams are physically close to our customers in the US and Europe.

As a company, we focus on large enterprises with millions of end-user customers. Most of our customers to date have been banks, insurance companies, telcos, and retailers. We have two global financial customers with over 20 million users each, and about 20 customers with more than five million users each. Our customers typically use our platform to consolidate and accelerate multiple initiatives in the identity space. For example; multi-factor authentication in biometrics, behavioral analytics, and advanced fraud detection, attributes-based access control, new data protection regulations, using the mobile device as an authenticator for call centers, branch and web, authorization and authentication around open API’s, and more.

High: Yours is an organization that is experiencing extraordinary growth, and you have been able to do so without venture funding. Could you talk about the way in which you have grown, as well as the advantages of having done so without taking on venture funding in your early stages?

Boodaei: Our goal was to build a big company that is focused on what we enjoy doing around cybersecurity, which is working with large enterprises. We wanted absolutely zero external pressure as to the direction of the company or the speed in which we are growing. Therefore, my co-founder Rakesh Loonkar and I decided to invest our own money in the company.

We have been relatively successful in the past, so we could afford the risk of losing many millions if we failed. Today, Transmit is a profitable company, so the investment paid off. Not taking money from venture capitalists is not something everyone can do, so we consider ourselves lucky to be able to fund ourselves. Personally, I find it uncomfortable taking someone else’s money when I can do this with my own.

I also believe that it made us more focused and got us to work harder. If you look at first-time entrepreneurs, they are eager to secure their future. For us, by using a considerable amount of our own fortune, we created a strong motivation for ourselves to succeed that is not dissimilar from first-time entrepreneurs. This is the idea behind the self-funding concept of our company.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes

3/19/18

By Peter High, published on Forbes

Naresh Shanker was named CIO of HP Inc. prior to the company’s separation from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) This was the apotheosis of a remarkable career. He had been an IT executive in the technology industry for many years, including the CIO role at Palm until its acquisition by HP. The separation would be the biggest challenge he would yet face in his career.

At the time of the separation, there were some who believed that HP Inc. would be substantially weakened by this separation. Moreover, Meg Whitman, who had been the CEO of HP Inc. remained as Chairman of the company and would take over the CEO role of HPE. HP Inc. would be led by a new CEO Dion Weisler. Remarkably, the separation proceeded with few issues and was on time, and the company has flourished.

Since the separation, Shanker turned his attention to a major digital transformation of the business. The legendary OEM that had been the founding company of Silicon Valley would need to truly become a digital enterprise. Shanker noted that with the hyperconnected economy that we now have, HP Inc. needed to reflect this in its own business. In this far ranging interview, he covers all of the above, and offers essential lessons for other companies who must transform in a comparable fashion.

Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of HP Inc. HP Enterprise [HPE] separated from HP Inc. in November of 2015. This was one of the biggest separations in corporate history, and you were involved on both sides of that transformation. Can you talk about the scale of separation, and how you thought about planning the separation of a roughly $120 billion revenue company into two roughly $60 billion revenue companies?

Naresh Shanker: We first looked to determine the mandatory minimum requirements that we had to meet from a regulatory and compliance perspective. Our goal was to prioritize and execute the separation into an independent company within 12 months. That is not a small feat, and it has never been accomplished before with a high-tech company of this magnitude, scale, and complexity.

After defining the scope of the mandatory requirements, we looked at what it would take to fundamentally stand up two public entities. HPE focused on our compute network storage solutions coupled with HP Software, as well as HP Enterprise Services. HP’s focus is predominantly around our printing business, our personal systems business, and our 3D additive manufacturing business.

A major task was to separate out the architectures from the infrastructure layer, the wide area networks, local area networks, and the underlying solutions, which is the applications fabric. Several facilities and sites worldwide had to be separated and secured so that we could deem ourselves separate identities and meet all the financial and regulatory requirements of standing up our public companies.

We successfully achieved that in 12 months. After that separation was completed, we were able to stand ourselves up as two public companies. We then embarked on using this opportunity as a catalyst for each of our independent companies to transform and reinvent ourselves. We took advantage of the separation so that we could compete in our independent markets more aggressively and in a more focused manner.

The first thing we did was lay out a five-year roadmap. 2015 was the separation year. 2016 was the year of standing up the company and our independent operations. IT had a lot of work to do here, including rebuilding all the operations and capabilities ground up, from the infrastructure layer to the applications layer, and putting in place all the operational metrics and SLAs so that we could stabilize and run our operations on a 24/7 cadence.

2017 was focused on starting our transformation journey. Our goal from 2017 to 2020 is to complete the execution of our transformation journey. A significant portion of that is in flight, and a lot of it has already been completed.

Our current strategic focus is pivoting from being a transaction-oriented company, where our systems are designed around transactions and physical goods flows, to being a more contractual and digital centric organization. How do we move from a hardware player to being more of a solutions services player? That is what we laid out from an IT architecture point of view to start building the foundation of this journey so that we could pivot ourselves to being a digital company.

We focused on two things: one is supporting an omni-channel go-to-market strategy, and the second is everything-as-a-service play, which involved solutions and services across all lines of business. The separation served as the catalyst to help us pivot from a physical goods and hardware OEM manufacture to more of a digital goods solutions and services technology company.

As we go forward, we will continue to evolve our solutions and services with more user centered experiences and designs in mind. Our focus is ensuring that the user experience, the partner experience, and the customer experience are delivered with a digital mindset. Using the separation as a catalyst, we have fundamentally transformed ourselves to become a digital player in the industry.

High: The transformation that you have been leading is in many ways the transformation that is necessary across a number of industries. As the CIO of one of the original Silicon Valley companies, and one which is now transforming from a manufacturer of physical goods to being focused on digital solutions, can you talk about the changes that are necessary from an IT perspective to deliver that transformation?

To read the full interview, please visit Forbes

by Peter High, published on Forbes

1-11-2016

Seven months ago, Trevor Schulze joined $16 billion Micron Technology, a global provider of semiconductor devices, as the company’s first ever chief information officer. After spending time as a technology leader at other technology-centric companies like Broadcom, AMD, and Cisco, Schulze found an opportunity that it seemed he had been preparing for throughout his career. He had been an IT executive who had worked well in companies where even members of the Finance or HR teams had technology backgrounds, and was able to make the case for the value that IT could create on behalf of the enterprise.

Prior to starting his job, he delved deeply into all strategic collateral he could, and got to know more about the company and its culture. Once on the job, he spent time with his new colleagues across the enterprise.  Since then, he has changed the organization structure such that IT is closer to the other business functions, and has developed a dedicated business intelligence and data team, as he believe these are areas of substantial opportunity for IT and for Micron Technology more generally. He also notes security as an area of increased investment, as he hopes to develop true thought leadership on his team in this critical area.

(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 31^st interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read past articles with the CIOs of Johnson & Johnson, AmerisourceBergn, Deutsche Bank, General Electric, and Procter & Gamble, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: Please begin with a description of Micron Technology’s business.

Trevor Schulze: Micron has been around for more than 35 years. It is a global leader in advanced semi-conductor systems. As a company, we design and manufacture an incredibly broad portfolio of high-performance memory technologies. These include DRAM, Flash Memory, SSDs (Solid State Drives), and emerging technologies like 3D Xpoint, which we announced recently. In a short period of time, I have been exposed to this internal innovation as a company. I am blown away by how strategic it is. In the world’s innovation engines – compute, storage, networking, mobile, and embedded – if it has a computer in it, it most likely has Micron memory associated to it.

High: I was also curious to find that you are the first CIO of the organization, despite its long history. Why did the organization feel the time was right, and why did it wait so long, in your estimation?

Schulze: We went through the interview process we were discussing what the first CIO would be responsible for. The company is evolving from an operations perspective. If you step back and look across all industries, there is a core infrastructure renaissance underway. The demand for innovations in memory solutions is unprecedented. Micron’s business model is pivoting. It has done from a demand fulfillment model, where we would make parts, put them on the market, and people would buy them by the pound.

We are evolving to this “demand-creation” model. What this means is that we have an expanded set of customers that we have never had before. There are more diversified end-markets, and new operational scale and speed demands. The industry has a voracious appetite for memory solutions. As the first CIO, they recognized that there needed to be somebody with industry experience to support this business transformation that we have underway. They needed someone to sit at the metaphorical table and help drive the new and changing processes. There are new demands for data and insights. There is a new speed of delivery required. Information technology inside of Micron is poised to grow significantly in importance and opportunity. That is where they felt the opportunity was to bring in a CIO and drive this opportunity forward.

To read the full article, please visit Forbes