In this podcast, Michael Hugos provides insight from his CIO experience and his latest book, Business Agility – Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World.

Michael Hugos, the former CIO for Network Services Company, took a different track when he wrote his latest IT book. Business Agility – Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World provides business executives with tools and tips on how they can help IT professionals drive business revenue. He says that IT professionals tend to forget that the business is where the money is. That's why IT exists." He adds that technologies, such as cloud computing, open source and virtualization, will provide great cost benefits to the business. "We need to be in better position to guide these decisions."

Hugos has first-hand experience working with business executives to drive revenue at Network Services Company, an $8 billion cooperative of 86 distributors that market industrial products to major companies. Before this company became agile, the profit margin on coffee cups was practically nothing and getting smaller. Multiply this by Network Services' distributors who sell to 5,000 stores across the country. He says, "We banded together under this cooperative and worked closely with sales. Interesting things started to happen and ideas for making more money started to flow." The information-based, value-added services Hugos helped to devise returned a two percent to three percent profit margin. "If you do things right, you can earn more money or what he calls the agility dividend"

Hugos thinking is nothing new. He refers to the invisible hand theory which Adam Smith, the great British economist, came up with 250 years ago. He says, "The invisible hand pushes the price of all products to their cost of production. No amount of fast talking sales people and ball game tickets will change this."

The end result for Network Services was complete transparency for more products. Hugos says, "Out of the 50 items we came up with, we carried out 25 for them. For example, we could fill an order directly off a purchasing system or via EDI or XML. We now had a customized solution that made our paper cups more valuable."

In this podcast, Hugos provides some current IT enablers that will help an organization achieve speed and agility, give some examples of companies that have achieved both business and IT speed and agility, and offers takeaways to help CIOs assess the business impact of IT based on speed and agility.

Bio
Michael Hugos, at Center for Systems Innovation [c4si], mentors companies and teams in practices of IT and business agility. Up until 2006, he was the corporate CIO at Network Services Company, an $8.2 billion cooperative distributor of janitorial product and disposable food service items. His books include the Essentials of Supply Chain Management (2nd Edition), Building the Real-Time Enterprise, and he contributed to CIO Best Practices -- Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology. His most recent book is Business Agility – Sustainable Prosperity in a Relentlessly Competitive World.

Resources
Michael Hugos' Blog, CIO Magazine, "Doing Business in Real Time"

http://advice.cio.com/taxonomy/term/30

Michael Hugos' Website

http://www.michaelhugos.com/Center_for_Systems_Innovation.html

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer
Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

In this podcast, Mark Lobel, a subject expert at PricewaterhouseCoopers, discusses the pros and cons of the four facets of cloud computing. He also touches on other cloud computing issues that should be of concern to CIOs.

Cloud computing has become an interesting and important subject on the minds of most CIOs. Its complexity has forced CIOs to think about what applications make sense to move to the cloud, what type of a cloud -- internal versus external, will work best for the organization, and how does an organization know its data will be secure?

PricewaterhouseCoopers recently published its quarterly Technology Forecast with an emphasis on cloud computing. Based on material in the report, Mark Lobel, a subject expert for PricewaterhouseCoopers, looks at cloud computing as having four facets. If one were to draw a matrix with four boxes, the top left box would include software as a service, and infrastructure as a service would be below it. The top right side of the matrix would include on-premises and off-premises or a combined public and private cloud application capability, and cloud bursting would be below it.

In this podcast, Lobel looks at the pros and cons for using each one of these cloud computing facets. He also looks at the overall strengths and weaknesses of the cloud computing industry; the way an organization's culture affects its approach to cloud computing; the ROI benefits of cloud computing; the way cloud computing will change applications development; and some takeaways CIOs should consider before deploying a cloud computing strategy.

Bio
Mark Lobel is the global PricewaterhouseCoopers subject matter expert on security benchmarking, as well as other subjects such as cloud computing. He frequently speaks on benchmarking and other topics for the MIS Training Institute, The Information Security Forum, IBM Training, and other organizations. He is the lead professional on PricewaterhouseCoopers' annual Global Security Survey with CIO and CSO magazines.
He is a Certified Information Systems Auditor, a Certified Information Systems Security Professional, and a Certified Information Security Manager (CISM). Lobel also belongs to the Information Security Systems Audit and Control Association CISM Task Force helping guide the development of this new security certification. His other association memberships include the New York Chapter of ISACA and the New York Chapter of the Information Systems Security Association. He received a B.S in broadcast communications from Oswego State.

Resources
Mark Lobel of PriceWaterhouseCoopers: Update on Recent Information Security Trends, Bank Info Security
http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/html/mark-lobel-pwc-podcast.html

Podcast: 10 Minutes on Data and Identity Theft, PricewaterhouseCoopers
http://www.pwc.com/us/en/10minutes/podcast/index.jhtml

PricewaterhouseCoopers: Security Budgets Remain Intact, Channel Insider
http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Security/PriceWaterHouseCoopers-Security-Budgets-Remain-Intact-440154/

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

In this podcast, Dr. Peter Beckman, director of leadership computing at Argonne National Laboratory. talks about both cloud computing and green IT at the Lab.

Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) is one of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) oldest and largest national laboratories for science and engineering research. ANL uses its annual $540 million operating budget to support 100's of research projects of interest to numerous federal agencies, and academic research institutions. ANL is one of DOE's two largest supercomputing centers. The other one is at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In addition to supercomputing, ANL also offers its researchers some less expensive alternatives, namely, grid computing, and soon, cloud computing. Peter Beckman, the ANL's director of leadership computing, says that grid computing is best suited for running applications at multiple sites in cycles available to users in many locations. He says, "On the other hand, cloud computing will enable scientists to build their own solutions as they need them and run them in the cloud. It will also enable the consolidation and sharing of Linux clusters hosted on our cloud. For example, hosting will enable you to expand your 32-node cluster to a 200-node cluster for a few days. "

Opportunities for cloud computing at ANL include everything form studying the genome to looking at data from CERN's supercollider to understanding the smallest particles in the galaxy.

Cloud computing at ANL will eliminate the need for scientists to do their work on a $100 million supercomputer. Beckman says cloud computing is very appealing to some of ANL's researchers. He say, "Cloud computing's bursty, pay-as-you go for cycles model will lower the cost of getting some projects done. It will allow for demand-driven, large allocations of resources, such as a 1,000's of processors for the next couple of week, better than going to a supercomputer. It will also eliminate the need to upgrade equipment." Beckman adds that ANL would like to push some of its cloud capabilities to commercial service such as amazon.com.

In addition to cloud computing, ANL is saving money by optimizing data center technologies, such as water-size economizing, to keep the supercomputer cool and energy efficient. In fact, the chip architecture of ANL's supercomputer uses the least amount of power possible to do its scientific calculations. Beckman says, "Our data center is a factor of two less power data centers that have a different architecture." During some of the winter months, ANL uses water-side economizing to reduce energy costs. The process involves sending the water outside to be cooled by the cooling tower, and then piping the cooled water through heat exchangers in the machine room. He says, "We can cool the machine for free. We'd like to expand the number of months we can do this for."

Bio
Since 2008 Peter Beckman has been the director of leadership computing at Argonne National Laboratory, where he oversees its supercomputing facility. After receiving his Ph.D. in computer science from Indiana University, Beckman helped found the university's Extreme Computing Laboratory, which focused on parallel languages, portable run-time systems, and collaboration technology. In 1997 he joined the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he founded the ACL's Linux cluster team and launched the Extreme Linux series of workshops and activities, which helped catalyze the high-performance Linux computing cluster community. In 2000 he founded a Turbolinux-sponsored research laboratory in Santa Fe that developed the world's first dynamic provisioning system for cloud computing and HPC clusters. The following year, he became vice president of Turbolinux's worldwide engineering efforts, managing development offices in the US, Japan, China, Korea, and Slovenia. Beckman joined Argonne National Laboratory in 2002, as director of engineering, and later as chief architect for the TeraGrid. He designed and deployed the world's most powerful grid computing system for linking production HPC computing centers for the National Science Foundation.

Resources

Argonne's supercomputer named world's fastest for open science, third overall, Physorg.org
http://www.physorg.com/news133014256.html

Argonne Computer Goes Green, Power Management Design Line
http://www.powermanagementdesignline.com/news/212501723;jsessionid=1S14SOXKCF1QYQSNDLRCKHSCJUNN2JVN

Getting Control of the Cloud, Processor.com
http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp3114%2F69p14%2F69p14%2F69p14.asp

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis