Rod Hefford, CIO for Global Customer Development and Supply Chain at Unilever, discusses they key goals of their Compass strategy, how IT is organized to drive innovation globally. Hefford also explains how mobility is empowering Unilever to respond to changing market conditions and customer needs, and is fostering a virtuous cycle of improvement.
HBO CIO Michael Gabriel explains why it's imperative for CIOs to understand how their businesses and customers are changing. He also explains why professional development is critical to IT success and shares his views on how business, academia and government need to work together better to ensure the development of the next generation of IT leaders and strong job growth.
In a recent series of interviews, IDG Enterprises's chief content officer, John Gallant, spoke with several CEOs about a wide range of current challenges facing top tech executives. Some put the customer first, and some decidedly do not. Register to download the PDF.
To hear Oracle President Mark Hurd tell it, the $37.1 billion hardware and software company is well ahead of competitors on any number of fronts, from transitioning customers to SaaS and the cloud, to incorporating social technology into its products.
Egenera CEO Pete Manca says the company was 10 years ahead of its time in targeting the converged data center infrastructure, but its smooth transition from a hardware-focused company to a software-oriented one in recent years has enabled it to stay in the thick of what's now a booming market pursued aggressively by Cisco, HP and others. As part of our ongoing IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant spoke recently with Manca about Egenera's strategic shift, its partners and competitors, and a big new product announcement.
With the U.S. Supreme Court now debating the fate of the so-called 'Obamacare' legislation passed in 2010, healthcare has been much in the news of late -- and not much of the news about healthcare is very good.
The customer always comes first. Except when it comes to HCL, the $6 billion Indian outsourcing -- make that co-sourcing -- giant led by CEO Vineet Nayar, who literally wrote the book on a philosophy known as 'employees first, customer second.' In this latest installment of our CEO Interview Series, Nayar spoke with IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant about how that philosophy is fueling HCL's rapid growth and why more CIOs ought to consider adopting it. Nayar also discussed how HCL has set its sights beyond competing with other Indian outsourcers like Infosys and Wipro and is squarely targeting what he believes are the many unhappy customers of services giants like IBM, Accenture and CSC. The outspoken Nayar took shots at the 'fear psychosis' created by services firms in trying to peddle their offerings and used a barnyard epithet to describe public cloud computing, which he claims isn't ready for prime time. He also outlined HCL's aggressive plans for hiring locally in the U.S. and Europe, and defended the company's use of the controversial H-1B visa program. In addition, Nayar talked about the new goals for IT departments in 2012 and beyond, and explained why treating mobile as a technology 'misses the point.'
Ask Louie Ehrlich, CIO and president of Chevron Information Technology Company, about the most important things he's learned leading a giant, global IT team through massive change and you get a surprisingly non-technology focused answer: You've gotta scratch the itch, act like a two-year-old, mind the gap and live like you're dying. Those things sound simple, but they're hard-won lessons for Ehrlich, the top tech executive for the nearly $250 billion energy company, whose three-year transformation effort has yielded the better part of a billion dollars in payback for Chevron.
Lots of people make New Year's resolutions, using the turning of a calendar page as a spur to change. But for Underwriters Laboratories' CIO Christian Anschuetz, January 1 marked the beginning of a profound transformation -- one that he and his team have helped envision and enable. As the ball dropped in Times Square to mark the start of 2012, UL -- the product testing and certification company that has been ensuring safe products for over a century -- transformed from a non-profit organization to a for-profit company in the U.S., with a focus on delivering new products and services to its global customer base. In this first installment of the IDG Enterprise CIO Interview Series, Anschuetz spoke with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant about IT's role in shaping and supporting this business change and what it means for him and his organization. Anschuetz, who worked for years in the advertising industry, described why embracing consumer technology is critical to 'amplify human ability' and how IT should be measured for its success in driving customer value and revenue. He explained why he holds up Amazon.com as UL's 'metaphorical competitor' and why 'big data' without 'big discretion' will lead to 'big failure'.
Intuit, known for personal financial products like TurboTax and Quickbooks, isn't considered a corporate IT company nor does it have any grand designs to expand beyond its consumer and small business roots into the enterprise.
William McCracken took over as chief executive officer of CA Technologies close to two years ago and in that time has engineered a series of organizational changes and acquisitions aimed at improving the company's perception among buyers and broadening its reach into new areas of technology and new customer segments.
Corporate functions from human resources to customer relationship management (CRM) have already been migrated to the cloud. But are you ready for systems monitoring and management in the cloud? More important, is management-as-a-service (MaaS) ready for your company?
It used to be easy journalistic shorthand to write 'database-giant Oracle Corp.', but that labeling no longer fits a company that's now a key player in applications, appliances, servers, development tools, operating systems and, yes, even cloud computing. How do all these components gel into a coherent plan for IT customers? What makes Oracle better than the other big integrated systems players like HP and IBM? In this latest installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, Oracle President Mark Hurd spoke with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant about Oracle's strategy and why the company is uniquely positioned to help IT leaders deal with the difficult challenges they're facing today. Hurd also clarified Oracle's stance on cloud -- a position clouded -- sorry -- by some earlier comments from CEO Larry Ellison -- and what makes Oracle's approach better than 'very old' cloud solutions like salesforce.com. He explained more about customer migrations to Oracle's new Fusion applications and discussed how Oracle plans to win in the evolving server market.
How's this for a challenge? The CEO dies suddenly and you're tabbed to take his place -- on the heels of your network infrastructure company entering into a major new strategic partnership and in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Oh, did I mention your competition includes some companies named <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/subnets/cisco/">Cisco</a> Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks, among others? That's life for Chris Crowell, CEO of Enterasys Networks, who took over in 2009 shortly after predecessor <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/092408-fabiaschi-dies.html">Mike Fabiaschi's untimely death</a>. Since then, Crowell has refreshed Enterasys' product line, pushed for the development of innovative new <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/060811-enterasys-isaac.html">social media-based</a> <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/topics/network-management.html">network management</a> capabilities that promise to make life easier for network admins, and achieved record sales in the last financial quarter. In this latest installment of the <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/keywords/ceo-interviews.html">IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series</a>, Crowell spoke with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant about how Enterasys is competing against networking's big dogs, explored an upcoming fabric launch expected in October and talked about the company's <a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/072908-siemens-enterasys.html?hpg1=bn%25252520">partnership with Siemens Enterprise Communications</a>. He also explained why "Isaac" is so important and where Enterasys plans to take the technology.
The Attachmate Group this week finalized its $2.2 billion buyout of network industry pioneer Novell, which begins the next phase of its evolution. Attachmate will operate Novell as two separate business units, one focused on the Novell brand and the other on the SUSE Linux brand. In addition, the privately held Attachmate Group has business units focused on the Attachmate and NetIQ brands. IDG Enterprise's Chief Content Officer John Gallant spoke with Attachmate Chairman and CEO Jeff Hawn shortly after the Novell deal was sealed to get his thoughts on what the acquisition means for Attachmate and its new and old customers.