Bob Sanguedolce is Chief Information Officer and VP of Program Management for eBay, Inc. responsible for all corporate and business systems, management reporting and M&A technology integration. Previously, he founded Assured Solutions, an ERP consulting firm, and directed Information Systems groups at Bay Networks, General Mills, and General Electric. Focused throughout his career on returning information value to the enterprise, Mr. Sanguedolce has led major efforts in e-commerce, ERP, data warehousing and manufacturing automation systems.

His daily responsibilities bring several challenges and several of those challenges are related to the health of the IT systems. Given that eBay's business is conducted in real-time over the web with millions of subscribers conducting simultaneous transactions, it is not uncommon to see zillions of bytes of data being processed by the servers. Data backup and server reliability play a key role in ensuring that customers will trust eBay to deliver the right information at the right time to the right set of people. A CIO can get focused on ensuring the operations of IT systems and may momentarily ignore the reliability of supporting systems such as HVAC, lighting/power, building security, etc. Bob highlighted the importance and monetary consequences of not monitoring the real-time performance and health of non-IT systems, which typically fall under the purview of the facilities department.

CIOs, while not usually responsible for facilities systems, may be held accountable for IT related business impacts triggered by problems with facilities systems. Therefore, power backup systems, data warehouses with co-location facilities, and other common mitigating measures are critical elements of a healthy company. The magnitude of impact of non-IT systems varies by industry. Financial services and other transaction heavy industries stand to lose a lot more in the event of an earthquake, power failure, fire, etc. Companies typically look at investments in systems that ensure business continuity as insurance - systems that they need to own but would dread to use except those that continuously monitor the health of all systems.

One such company is NetBrowser Communications (www.netbrowser.com), whose patented method of remote management of power, fire, environmental and physical security sub-systems works securely right through your existing IP network. NetBrowser Communications is the pioneer in web-based, integrated, machine communication and management. A software company, NetBrowser has devised embeddable agent and server application technologies which enable a "configured vs. customized" unification of equipment through an IP network, eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming systems integration.

The CIOs reviewed and discussed NetBrowser's unique technology and pointed out that to a great extent their success was tied to the performance of the facilities. The CIOs unanimously agreed that NetBrowser may be best served by spending time enabling service provider firms and their technologies with e-Guardian so that it is not sold as a technology or point solution, but inherently and service enablers for the service firm. This is to say, service firm X can provide services better, faster and cheaper because it is supported by e-Guardian. CIOs want to see the "issue of facilities" addressed and not "issues within facilities" addressed.

With an increasing amount of attention being given to existing IT investments and the need to integrate disparate systems so that companies can respond to customer needs more rapidly, it is important to examine the level of integration and readiness of non-IT systems. http://www.netbrowser.com/abt/abt002.html

Outlook Ventures hosted this event on October 30th in Palo Alto. Attendees included Bob Sanguedolce from eBay, Armin Pressler from Windriver, Brian Bauer from Cadence, Glenn Ricart from Centerbeam, Gary Riske from KPMG, Jose Morales-Correa from Solrico Consultants, Rocky Vienna from Knight Ridder, Stuart Robbins from Kmera, and Tom Wasilczyk from Sun Microsystems.