Bill Howard, CIO for SUN Microsystems, at our semi-annual "Meeting of the Minds" event on June 2002
On June 27th Bill Howard, Chief Information Officer of SUN Microsystems, addressed invited angels, CEOs, CIOs, and technology leaders on the topic of "CIO Priorities in Today's Environment", emphasizing IT spending. Bill was able to offer a broad perspective of the everyday challenges that he and his group deal with at SUN.
The CIO organization at SUN is responsible for supporting the corporation in its mission, which is to be the #1 provider of products, technologies, and services for enabling the Net Economy. SUN wants to enable business for anyone, anywhere, anytime, on anything. The challenges that the CIO organization deals with are the size and complexity of the corporation, which spans over 170 countries, 300 offices, thousands of suppliers and partners, and 40 thousand employees; all from a centralized infrastructure. Every single day, SUN handles over 5 million e-mails, hosts over 18 thousand websites, and manages 260 thousand IP addresses including 5 thousand servers, 40 thousand desktops, and 400 networked applications that support their business.
Bill identified common CIO themes that can be classified in three groups. First, his group is being asked to do more with less, requiring more focus on ROI/ROA on all initiatives and relationships with vendors, outsourcers, and service providers. Secondly, his group needs to adapt to rapid business changes without compromising the reliability of systems. This requires 100% uptime for everything, increased security and business continuity, simplification of business processes and application environments, and reduced time to market for services and systems. Last, the theme of innovating to reduce operating costs includes initiatives in web services and utility computing.
When discussing broader industry trends, Bill identified the following:
Technology: Java Technology is solidifying as the backbone of distributed applications and there is little question about the browser being the portal of all applications going forward. Innovation will come form increased mobility needs, wireless technologies, and thin-client implementations.
Extended Enterprise: The need for partner integration is driving interest in collaboration tools and eBusiness applications. Business applications are moving from software that sits in servers to being more like services exposed to internal and external parties.
Infrastructure: Well-known trends revolve around security and business continuity- high availability, disaster recovery, server consolidation and redundancy, etc. Infrastructure is also moving away from being a fixed allocated cost, to service-based expenses.
Applications: Leading trends include consolidation of applications and expanded application functionality. Expanded functionality for applications includes integration (web services), intelligence (knowledge and content management) and self-service capabilities.
Bill enlightened the audience by sharing his group's criteria for 2003 investments in IT. The top-5 prioritized criteria include the initiative's ability to:
1) Support current revenue-generating programs
2) Reduce operating costs
3) Support new, incremental revenue generating programs
4) Enhance customer satisfaction
5) Improve employee productivity
Efforts that increased in visibility from this new emphasis included: collaboration initiatives (including content management and portal), sales force automation, integration efforts, storage systems and management, and new technologies like blade servers, peer-to-peer computing, and grid computing.
The audience benefited from the level of detail that Bill shared in terms of specific efforts and projects and his honest and sincere responses. Those present at the meeting learned about the balancing act that CIOs like Bill have to perform. Costs need to be reduced, but business and innovation need to be enabled for companies to succeed in today's economy.
Bill's address was followed by a panel moderated by one of our General partners, Carl Nichols. Panelists included Bill, Sateesh Lele (former CIO of Pepsi, Avon, and GM Europe), and Charles Pelton (Chairman of Phocas Partners and former editor of InformationWeek, responsible for their CIO Conferences and CIO Boot Camps).
