When it comes to looking for a job, an apartment, or even a good garage sale, more than 26 million unique visitors each month turn to a Craigslist.com site in one of 450 cities in 50 countries. No one can dispute the cult-like reputation Craigslist, founded by Craig Newmark, has earned. As a company, Craigslist runs frugal with 25 employees working out of an old Victorian building in San Francisco. However, Craigslist has proven that even a well meaning, grassroots bunch of nerds can put a big dent in the advertising profits earmarked for 1,000 of newspapers. Let's not forget how Craigslist, which is 25 percent owned by eBay, has changed the way many of us live and work.

So how did Craigslist, which started as Newsmark's idea for a San Francisco events list 12 years, come this far? Why would a company that could be making hundreds of millions of dollars each year continue to offer a primarily free service? What drives Craigslist's quirky form of innovation and culture? These are some of the things enterpriseleadership.org asked Jim Buckmaster, craigslist CEO. Since 2000, Buckmaster has led craigslist to be the most used classifieds in any medium, and one of the world's most popular Web site.

Bio
Since 2000, Jim Buckmaster has been CEO of craigslist.com, which is 25 percent owned by eBay. Before craigslist, Buckmaster directed Web development for Creditland and Quantum, a major disk drive company. He built the terabyte-scale, database-driven Web interface at ICPSR through which researchers worldwide access the primary data archive for the social sciences. After graduating summa cum laude with a degree in biochemistry, Buckmaster attended medical school at the University of Michigan. Business publications, such as The Wall Street Journal and Fortune, frequently write about him. He also has made dozens of television appearances.

Resources
Business Week -- A Talk With Craigslist Keeper

USA Today -- Jim Buckmaster's Best Business Book Picks

Fast Company - Is It Still Craig's List

New York Times -- What eBay Could Learn from Craigslist

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish Host and Audio Producer
5AlarmMusic.com  Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production

Like many large companies, Sybase, with $1 billion in revenues, has eliminated millions of dollars of unnecessary IT costs in the past few years. This data company has gone from 30 global centers down to three consolidated data centers. Jim Swartz, Sybase's CIO and vice president, says, "Our mantra is to simplify, to standardize, and to consolidate." The primary data center now resides at the corporate headquarters.

However, Sybase has an aggressive plan to keep IT costs down by going green. In fact, Jim Swartz, CIO of Sybase, says that initiatives, such as server virtualization, service oriented architecture, retiring and redeploying servers, temporary storage of the OS, and improved cooling, could postpone the building of a new data center until 2017. Swartz says, "About a year ago, we realized that we were going to run out of power and cooling in the near future unless we did something. We looked for clever ways to solve the problem rather than to spend upwards of $10 million to retrofit or to build a brand new data center."

In this podcast, Jim Swartz, CIO and vice president of Sybase, describes his company's green program for the entire enterprise.

Bio
Jim Swartz is chief information officer and vice president of Sybase, where he oversees a team of IT professionals who provide applications and computing support to worldwide business and engineering units. Before Sybase, Swartz was CIO at SRI International and at Science Applications International Corporation. He has been a member of the California Information Technology Commission, providing recommendations on policy and technology issues to the State Department of Information Technology.

Resources
Sybase Touts Software as a Service
Interop

Wireless Enterprise

Information Liquidity Sybase

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
5AlarmMusic.com, Production Music Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production