When Don Hopkins retired as chief information officer at NCR, he decided to join SunGard Availability Services, a business unit of the $5 billion SunGard  Corp. SunGard Availability Services provides the company's more than 10,000 customers in North American and in Europe with solutions that ensure uninterrupted access to mission-critical data and systems. By reporting to SunGard's CEO, Hopkins has insight into the company's strategic initiatives and, as a result, has the opportunity to understand what technologies would be good enablers to those strategic decisions.

In 1979, Hopkins joined NCR where he moved up the IT ranks from the director of general-purpose products to vice president of technology and infrastructure in NCR's IT services group, and to his last position as chief information officer. In fact, he played a leadership role in NCR's transformation and performance turnaround. In 2007, he successfully completed the very complex IT spin-off of Teradata as a separate company. Although this event happened during a very aggressive timeframe, Hopkins and the management team did it under planned budgets, both before and after the spin-off.

In this podcast, Hopkins talks about how he has translated his IT experiences at NCR and applied them as CIO at SunGard Availability Services. He also talks about NCR's strategy to cut its IT infrastructure costs and increase the company's profitability, its process for making investment decisions in technology, and its methodology for measuring the value of those investments.

Bio

Don Hopkins is vice president and chief information officer at SunGard Availability Services. Before joining this business unit of the $5 billion SunGard Corp., he was CIO at NCR Corporation and the vice president of technology and infrastructure in the company's IT services unit. He joined NCR in 1979. He holds master’s degrees in mathematics, school administration, computer science and business administration from the University of Dayton, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics/physics from Miami (Ohio) University.

Resources

Specialists Share  Transformation Models with Tech Providers, Industry Peers - Manufacturing  Business Technology

E-vaulting  Clears Hurdles to Vital Data - IDG Accelerate

CIO of  NCR Is Retiring - Dayton Business Journal

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini,  Executive Producer

Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Doug Marcis  - Audio and Music Editing