Official Title: CIO and Corporate Vice-President, Cadence Design.
IMV: How would you describe your career and background?
Bauer: My educational background and graduate work is related to mathematics and operations research, statistics, and coding series. Most of my career has been in the software systems integration space, mostly in the aerospace, financial and manufacturing industries. I have always run IT services organizations. I have also taught at Augustana College and in the Sloan School of Business at MIT, mostly around the concept of Distributed Systems Design and other subjects related to Information Services and Technology.
I spent the last 5 years at United Airlines running the Fleet Operations and IT group. In that group I managed over $3B/year in inventory, from engines to planes and other large assets. I managed all the systems involved in repairs, overhauls, asset tracking, re-engineering processes, etc. My responsibilities also included all the ground systems, like the vehicles that tend to be non-standard and sometimes much customized. A big part of the inventory was in the form of these vehicles running around many airports.
Now I am running the IT organization for Cadence Design. Cadence is the leading software tools vendor for Electronic Design Automation (EDA). All the tools needed to design electronic components and systems are developed by Cadence.
IMV: What is the role of your organization within Cadence Design?
Bauer: The key mission of my group is to closely align with the needs of the business. I have been in the Software Products group that builds VLSI design tools in the past, so I understand the business from a certain level. That group has turned their entire technical infrastructure to me and I now manage the back-office operations and the technical infrastructure that we use to develop our products. I think that because of our understanding of the business we are well aligned.
The second mission of our group is driving business value out of information systems for our business. It is analogous to the Department of Transportation Highway Projects. Their job is to build infrastructure. Our job is to ensure that Cadence Design moves from a Federal Highway System to an Interstate Highway System.
IMV: What have been the biggest challenges since you joined Cadence in 2001?
Bauer: When I joined Cadence we basically behaved like most software companies. We bought and used too many software tools. We had 3 big ERP systems in place, including SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel. One of the challenges that I have taken on has been the standardization of desktop, back office, and system applications as well as our business-specific applications. We just finished a global implementation of Siebel, supporting our sales, marketing service, and customer support. We now have over 2000 people on-line in Siebel after re-architecting the network because it wasn’t set up for a global enterprise software implementation. Part of re-architecting our network had to do with standardizing and simplifying it, segmenting it and improving performance. We need to work with WANs and LANs in over 50 locations, making sure that performance is there for everyone. We had to look at everything and standardize to be able to manage the network effectively. For example, the physical location and performance of our routers was not optimal. We decided to standardize our equipment with Cisco routers and we placed equipment in our network matching traffic to equipment performance. We are also standardizing and consolidating data centers and our computing assets.
Also, on the standardization of software, a key challenge was standardizing mail servers. Our company had more that 3 types of e-mail and calendaring systems and my group decided to deploy Microsoft Exchange everywhere. The last 2 initiatives in our standardization efforts included storage consolidation and computer systems standardization. We have over 300 TB of data in Cadence and it is doubling every 18 months, so I needed to move all the Direct Attached Storage (DAS) to a Storage Area Network (SAN) environment. We needed to slow down the growth of DAS storage and move it to SAN so that we could control the growth and build a centralized disaster recovery strategy. We decided on a SAN environment because of the performance required by our ERP systems and because I needed an enterprise storage management solution and not a departmental solution. I looked at Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions like Network Appliance, but those can’t scale above the 6 to 12TB range using overhead efficiently. We thought that at this point in time SAN solutions simply scaled better to high-end users.
A common theme that you’ll find in software companies is that CIOs have the task of working in an environment that has very sophisticated users because everybody develops software. It is quite a challenge to find the right way to insert yourself into the business and still be productive. In retail, food processing, or manufacturing the CEO worships the ground the CIO walks in. The CEO wouldn't know anything about their processes, products, etc. if it wasn’t for the IT group. In a software company you are always working with software experts and you have to be up to the challenge of having a different opinion that could be second-guessed. Building software products is very different from running them efficiently.
IMV: What are your top priorities going forward? What is the vision for IT at Cadence?
Bauer: The top priority is still aligning closely with the business. That is our mission and strategy for success. It has taken me a year to get my arms around our processes, assets and capabilities. Right now we are going through the process of defining our vision for the IT organization for the next 3-5 years. Once we do that, we need to identify the processes and tools that we’ll need to get to that future state. More specifically, one of my immediate challenges will be making the IT organization a more global entity. Cadence is a global company, but when I came here, 90% of IT personnel and resources were in San Jose. Now it is down to 47%, but the group has actually grown 10% overall in the last year and a half. Thankfully, this massive move of people has been through attrition or contractor conversion into other areas. Our India group, for example, used to do only maintenance. Now they do CRM, ERP and other things. Similarly it is happening that way in our Ireland and Texas locations, as well as the rest of the 50 offices and over 20 data centers around the world.
IMV: What do you think is interesting in technology today? What’s hot in high-tech?
Bauer: There is a lot of noise in the market today, especially in the Web Services and EAI spaces. One of the things we are going to be doing soon relates to the Semantic Web and Web Services, relating to how the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is evolving. Those areas are hot right now-- at least in Cadence they are. I am also interested in back office issues associated with storage virtualization tools and how we are going to get there.
Our group has built a tool that may be unique to Cadence, but we think it is competitive and more powerful than SUN’s Grid Engine. Our tool is called Matrix and its purpose is to manage heterogeneous computing environments. We at Cadence need to run tools across SUN Solaris, SUN/OS, HP/UX, IBM/AIX, Windows NT and the different versions of those platforms. We developed a job-scheduling process management tool that will put agents on each client machine controlling the flow of processes, such as testing, that can last for days. The tool we developed checks the utilization of a particular CPU or environment and if it is available it will be automatically brought online to work on the pending process queue. A particular process may be waiting for a Solaris 10 environment and as soon as one is freed up, it will automatically be reserved and assigned to a process so that it can start automatically. We are currently talking to two vendors who are interested in productizing it. Grid Engine from SUN Microsystems is very similar, but only works in SUN/Solaris boxes. The whole Grid Computing paradigm will start being more and more important, especially for large data centers.
The area of storage management is also hot these days. Storage is always growing and it is more complex to manage. We developed a unique piece of software that Veritas is actively looking at because they may be interested in acquiring it. It makes the SAN environment able to manage NAS resources, helping the convergence of these two different storage worlds. Our tool is not perfect, but it is certainly interesting. We built it last year on top of the Veritas platform and now we have it implemented in a few places for testing. I think that Veritas will eventually want to work with us to improve this tool.
Last, I am investing a lot in the area of intellectual property management. We have a lot of IP here at Cadence and we are interested in new ways of capturing and managing IP on the fly. Software development organizations are all about IP and need to use it, productize it and sell it. For example, in software, companies have a lot of processes and reusable resources that new employees need to discover on their own. Software development is ready for the next wave of formalization. We found that there was not much out there in the marketplace so we now have an R&D project in that area. I have sold the idea to management and now they are investing in me to develop a solution.
IMV: Any IT war stories?
Bauer: Once, while I was running systems at United Airlines we had a fire in Chicago and the back-up facility was in San Francisco. However, at the time we were moving it to Denver. The fire happened during the 3-month process of moving the back-up facility. At the end, we did not cancel any flights and only delayed one flight by a half hour. Now I keep a very active disaster recovery program here at Cadence. Our data centers simply do not go down. We have processes that crash, but we have never had a data center go down. It is not done; we are still working on ways to improve bandwidth and mirroring between data centers. Right now I am also implementing 3 types of management (internal, co-location, and outsource) for our data centers, always looking to optimize our resources according to criticality.
Backgrounder: Leading the Information Technology Group in providing services and support to customers is an important part of the contribution of Brian Bauer to Cadence. In addition to this responsibility, Mr. Bauer also provides leadership to the Operations Staff on both business and technology issues. Mr. Bauer began his employment at Cadence in 2001. There, Brian has aligned the IT Group to better support the business of Cadence. He also manages corporate programs such as CRM, PSA, and CDNi. Prior to Cadence, Bauer led the Information Technology Division for Fleet Operations at United Airlines. In this capacity he managed the support for all United Airlines aircrafts, engines and components world wide. Before United, Brian managed the systems integration business for The Analytic Sciences Co.
About Cadence: Cadence is the largest supplier of electronic design technologies, methodology services, and design services. Cadence solutions are used to accelerate and manage the design of semiconductors, computer systems, networking and telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics, and a variety of other electronics-based products. With approximately 5,600 employees and 2001 revenues of approximately $1.4 billion, Cadence has sales offices, design centers, and research facilities around the world. The company is headquartered in San Jose, CA, and traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CDN. More information about the company, its products and services is available at www.cadence.com.
