(23:08)

In this podcast, C.K. Prahalad, author of The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value Through Global Networks, and Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit, talks about how CIOs can use innovative technology to reshape their company's business model, as well as drive new opportunities for poverty-stricken area. (He calls the latter the bottom of the pyramid.)

Despite the downturn in the economic, this's a great time to be a CIO or CTO. That's the conclusion from C.K, Prahalad, the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy and the author of best-selling management books such as The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value Through Global Networks, and Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit. He says, "Because some CIOs must work under the pressure of shrinking budgets and don't have much time for innovation, this might be a tough concept for some CIOs to grasp."

Prahalad lists four fundamental drivers that can create new opportunities for all kinds of businesses - everything from retailing to financial services to manufacturing. These drivers include the convergence of technology, convergence of industry boundaries of technology, the emergence of social networking, and the globalization of things such as the global supply chain, global markets, and global research and development in third-world countries.

He says, "Convergence of technology is all around us. For example, the cell phone and the PC are now merging into one device. We're seeing a dramatic reduction in the cost of digital technology. Social networking sites such as Facebook didn't exist five years ago. Meanwhile, many companies have taken advantage of global opportunities by expanding to new markets in China and India."

In this podcast, Prahalad provides specific examples of how senior IT executives can address new business opportunities for their companies, how new technology initiatives can drive business opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid, why companies should embrace the concept of open innovation, and what the CIO role will be like 10 years from now.

Bio
C.K. Prahalad is the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and a globally recognized management thinker. He has consulted for the top management of many of the world's foremost companies, such as Ahlstrom, AT&T, Cargill, Citicorp, Eastman Chemical, Oracle, Phillips, Quantum, Revlon, Steelcase, and Unilever. Prahalad serves on the board of directors of NCR Corporation, Hindustan Lever Limited, and the World Resources Institute.

His best-selling management books include The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-created Value Through Global Networks, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profit (rereleased in 2009), Multinational Mission: Balancing Local Demands and Global Vision (co-authored), and Competing for the Future, and The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. He has authored numerous award-winning articles, several of which won the Harvard Business Review McKinsey Prizes. Other prizes include European Foundation for Management Award in 1993, 1994 Maurice Holland Award as the Best Paper, and the 1997 ANBAR Electronic Citation of Excellence.

Resources
C. K. Prahalad Talks about How Changing Business Models in the New Age of Innovation Will Impact IT, Enterpriseleadership.org
http://www.enterpriseleadership.org/blogs/Articles/2008/07/23/c-k-prahalad-talks-about-how-changing-business-models-in-the-new-age-of-innovation-will-impact-it

C. K. Prahalad Talks about Business Models Driving the New Age of Innovation, BTM Institute
http://www.btminstitute.org/LeadershipInsight/CKPrahalad.html

How Strategy Guru C.K. Prahalad Is Changing the Way CEOs Think
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_04/b3968089.htm

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

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

(19:12)

In this podcast, Steve Cakebread, the former president of Salesforce.com, takes the mystery out of cloud computing by explaining the complementary relationship of Salesforce.com, Google's Apps Engine, and Amazon's Web Services.

When Steve Cakebread joined Salesforce.com in 1999, the company had not even introduced its first product. That event happened two years later with the introduction of the single CRM product called Singular Edition people. Today, Salesforce.com has moved beyond CRM to become a diversified company in platforms such as knowledge management and service support. Cakebread says that these new platforms will help to spur the growth of the cloud computing industry.

Meanwhile, cloud computing has got a shot of adrenalin with the likes of Amazon.com's Web Services and Google.com's Apps Engine. Amazon.com built its business around store fronts and logistics, while Google.com's built its business around a consumer's ability to search. Cakebread says, "Amazon's Web services help businesses create those storage fronts on the fly through collaboration or cloud computing, as well as to provide businesses with additional storage and computing power. If you look at Google.com's Apps Engine, it is now creating developer platforms that make it easier to add information for consumers to share in businesses network."

Cakebread says that these three entities have a complementary relationship with each other through various relationships and partnerships. "Each of these technologies, even through they are considered cloud computing, all have different strengths. Salesforce.com is the business platform provider. Google.com focuses on search, while Amazon.com focuses on store fronts, logistics, storage, and computing power. All of these technologies are internally designed on the same technology platform as Oracle Solutions and blade services. The reality is that their architectures are very different, but they can be used by platform developers to achieve service and reliability."

In this podcast, Cakebread also discusses the key technologies that will benefit from cloud computing, the other areas in which both cloud computing and Web 2.0 will enable innovative enterprise applications, and the issues that need to be resolved before companies can deploy cloud computing widely.

Bio

Before becoming CFO of Xactly Corp., Steve Cakebread was the president and chief strategy officer at Salesforce.com. He had been the company's CFO for six months. During his tenure as Salesforce.com's CFO, Cakebread helped to grow the company from $22 million in annual revenue in 2002 to about $749 million in revenue in fiscal year 2008. He also led the company through its initial public offering in 2004.

Cakebread came to Salesforce.com from Autodesk, where he served as senior vice president and chief financial officer. Prior to joining Autodesk, he was vice president of finance for Silicon Graphics. He has also held many key positions at Hewlett Packard.

Cakebread holds a B.S. in Science from the University of California at Berkeley and a MBA from Indiana University.

Resources
Podcast -Steve Cakebread on SaaS, sales performance management, IT Knowledge Exchange

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/voices-of-crm/steve-cakebread-on-saas-sales-performance-management/

SaaS & the CFO: A Special Webinar with Steve Cakebread

http://www.opsource.net/event/saas-cfo-%E2%80%93-special-webinar-steve-cakebread

Salesforce.com exec named Xactly CFO, Silicon Valley Business Journal
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2009/02/09/daily51.html

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

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

Soon, it will be 4G wireless. This technology will not only provide a staggering amount of bandwidth, but it will create new business models, as well as a new platform for innovation. As a result, CIOs to become 4G wireless savvy immediately. That's the advice of Dr. Scott Snyder, author of The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in 4G Revolution. Now let's meet Dr. Snyder, author, professor, and CEO of Decision Strategies International.

Every now and then a disruptive technology comes along and dramatically changes the way we live and work. In the mid-1990s it was the Internet and TCP-IP, and in 2000, it was the iPhone. Soon, it will be 4G wireless. Consider, for example, how it could make healthcare more pervasive. A doctor in Africa doesn't need to make a dangerous trip to treat patients at a remote village. With 4G wireless technology, he can treat these patients remotely.

Since the 1990s, 3G wireless has been in place, providing us with increasing amounts of bandwidth, speed, and the ability to download multi-media content in a more efficient way. Dr. Scott Snyder, author of the New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution, says that many people think of 4G wireless, which is the next logical step in the progression of the technology, as just more bandwidth. "Yes, 4G wireless will offer up to 100 megabits per second to mobile users and one gigabit per second to fixed users. You are talking about a wireless connection that is 50 times faster than what you get in your home broadband connection. This is only part of the story. 4G wireless will provide a new paradigm that will alter the network and the handset, by enabling users to have more control over what type of content they get, and what type of services they can get from any location they might be in around the globe."

Snyder adds that user-centric capabilities will be the defining feature of 4G wireless. "Extremely intelligent handsets will have the ability to make decisions on your behalf, just like a remote control for your life. Because it is based on the cloud concept rather than a fixed network, 4G wireless has the capability to follow you around. You will have access to many networks without going back through a network. That's a scary proposition for wireless carriers that make money from people going through their network. This feature enables a whole variety of digital swarms or group behavior. Users can self-organize in this cloud without going through the structure of traditional networks."

As CEO of a Decision Strategies, a technology consulting firm, Snyder came across many executives who lacked awareness of what 4G wireless technology could do, not only to their business, but to their industry as a disruptive force and an innovation platform. The need to educate these executives propelled Snyder to write The New World of Wireless. His book is not just about what's happening with the technology, but how this technology could have broader social and business interactions to create new business models, new industries, and transformational type events.

Meanwhile, new standards for 4G wireless and experimental handsets loom on the horizon. Even aspects of the iPhone sheds light on what new business models might look like. Snyder says that because these weak signals will explode very fast, CIOs need to prepare for 4G wireless right now. "They need to start building wireless into their organization as a competency to be explored both as a communication platform, but also an innovation platform. They need to put the infrastructure in place to support both platforms and to leverage both to build an ecosystem with their customers, partners, vendors, and even your industry. They have to also start fostering wireless content, connectivity and allowing the digital swarm to take place both in your organization and in your ecosystem."

In this podcast, CIOs will learn the following:

• The top three things they should be doing to prepare for 4G wireless
• Some of the ways they can innovate around 4G wireless to become more profitable and derive more marketplace,
• The new business models that 4G wireless will enable, and
• And the security issues that will confront this technology.

Bio

Dr. Scott Snyder is the president and CEO of Decision Strategies International, a strategy firm focused on increasing the strategic aptitude of organization. He has held executive positions with several Fortune 500 companies including General Electric, Martin Marietta, and Lockheed Martin. He has also started business ventures in software including OmniChoice, a CRM/Analytics software applications provider. He was selected as a candidate for Entrepreneur of the Year for the Philadelphia Region. He has worked with numerous Fortune 500 clients on business and technology strategy including General Electric, NCR, Verizon, as well as government organizations such as the Federal Aviation Administration, National Security Administration, and the US Navy.

He has also contributed as a co-author to the recently released Future of BioSciences 2020 Report from DSI and the Wharton School and is the author of The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution.

Dr. Snyder is a senior fellow in the management department at the Wharton School, an adjunct faculty member in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and has lectured at MIT and RIT on decision-making, business and IT strategy, telecommunications, product design and development, and business intelligence. He holds a patent for on-line decision aids and has been quoted as a thought leader in numerous publications. Dr. Snyder earned his BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from University of Pennsylvania and has an executive degree from USC in Telecommunications Management.

Resources
Profile of Decision Strategies International, INC magazine

http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2008/company-profile.html?id=200819430

How Failure Breeds Success, BusinessWeek

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_28/b3992001.htm?campaign_id=nws_insdr_jul1&link_position=link1

Put on Hold: Why Telecoms Can't Get Consumers to Bond More with Their Cell Phones, Knowledge Emory

http://knowledge.emory.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1138

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

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software

After becoming CIO of Walmart.com in 2005, Rangan had the challenge of making sure that the online store stayed up and running around the clock. He said, “It had experienced a number of unexpected outages. My challenge also included carrying out the value proposition of the Wal-Mart store brand – Always Low prices, Always, and Save More, Live Better. When you shop at Wal-Mart, either in the stores or online, we guarantee that your purchases will cost less than if you bought the same goods from another source.”

Once Rangan’s team got through taking the necessary remedial steps, the online store just wasn’t opened all of the time, but it could also scale significantly to handle peak periods. In fact, on the day after Thanksgiving in 2005, Walmart.com surpassed amazon.com as the site with the highest traffic in the e-commerce space. Rangan says, “We had more than 3.5 percent of the nation’s population shopping the store on that day. It was a proud day for all of us.”

The following year, the Arkansas team asked Rangan and his team to create a global dot.com format. The transformative nature of the project would position Wal-Mart has having both a bricks and mortar and online presence in 12 different countries, including Canada, Mexico, the five countries in Central America, Brazil, Japan, the UK, Germany and Korea. He says, “The key question was how to institutionalize the largest brand in the brand world by turning the initial dot.com format into a global format. We had the challenge of ensuring a single format with multi-language, multi-fluencies, and multi-distribution capabilities. We also had to spearhead the global format from incubation to inception to proof of concept.”

In 2007, Rangan’s team proved that the online global format would work.  He said, “We blueprinted the entire concept so that it would be carried out over the next couple of years. Like Walmart.com, our global online store was another transformative initiative for this major brand.”

Although Rangan officially retired from being a CIO in 2008, he is still creating business impact of IT, as well as communicating how other CIOs can achieve it. He is currently the chief information technology officer for MarketShare Partners, an industry leading analytics firm that makes marketing more measurable and accountable than never before. He says, “We are enabling some of the largest brands in the world to determine how best to make their investment decisions, and how to measure these investments. In addition to his role at MarketShare Partners, Rangan has also written a book, called Tomorrow’s CIO: Strategic Executive Conversations. Rob Carter, the global CIO for Fedex, says that Rangan puts forth “much sound advice around how to navigate this complex and continuously changing space [of IT].”

In this podcast, Rangan explains the following:

• How to communicate business impact of IT to constituents,
• How to successfully measure the impact of IT,
• How to deal with the politics of being a CIOs,
• Why it might not be necessary for a CIO to be a regular board member, and
• How to develop IT professionals to speak the language of business.
• What business transformations he has lead

Bio

Ashwin Rangan is the chief information technology officer for MarketShare Partners (MSP), a private-equity backed company. Before MarketShare Partners, he assisted Bank of America’s Consumer Banking Sector in defining and developing new Web strategies that leveraged Web 2.0.  Rangan served as CIO for Walmart.com global. He previously was senior vice president and CIO of Conexant Systems Inc. He was a member of the founding team that spun-out Rockwell Semiconductor Systems and created Conexant.  Before Rockwell, he served in various senior management positions at AST Computer. He is a member of the governing body of both the NorCal and the SoCal CIO Executive Summit.  He frequently addresses the CIO institutes at the Haas and Anderson Schools. He has a Masters in Industrial Engineering and Management with an emphasis on IT and Operations Management from NITIE , Bombay, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Bangalore University, India.

Resources

SIPAcon 2008 – Interview with Ashwin Rangan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR2Q-1cY7dU

Interop – Podcast with Ashwin Rangan

http://interop.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=307719

Tomorrow’s CIO

Supply Chain Matters

http://www.theferrarigroup.com/blog1/?p=855

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer

Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software

In this podcast, Koulopoulos talks about the types of innovations we will see coming out of this recession, the CIOs role in building an innovation zone, the role social media will play in the innovation process, some of the ways to effectively measure innovation, and the use of smartsouring to describe the impact of technology on business.

Many business gurus consider relentless innovation to be the United States’ only remaining edge in a global marketplace marked by labor arbitrage and the competitive threats posed by exploding economies in China and elsewhere.

Tom Koulopoulos, the author of a new book, The Innovation Zone, and the founder of the Delphi Group, says, “While some progress is being made on the innovation front, too many U.S. companies still are underperforming when it comes to driving the type of sustained innovation needed to meet this competitive threat.
 
In his book, Koulopoulos demonstrates how organizations can create and sustain a culture of innovation.  Koulopoulos, who writes a blog called The Innovation Zone (http://www.tomkoulopoulos.com) says that if public and private organizations are serious about taking the lead in innovation and re-invigorating the marketplace and U.S. economy, they must move behind the hype of innovation and apply proven techniques and processes. His book provides a how-to-do blueprint for innovation process methods that organizations can put into practice. He says, “We need to stop singing innovation kumbaya and start delving into the practice and science of innovation.”

Koulopoulos’ insights about innovation have received wide praise from luminaries such as Peter Drucker, dee Hock, and Tom Peters who called Tom Koulopoulos' writing, “a brilliant vision of where we must take our enterprises to survive and thrive.”  According to Peter Drucker, Tom's writing “makes you question not only the way you run your business but the way you run yourself.”  He is also editor of the Delphi Report, a quarterly journal for business and technology leaders.

He sees signs that organizations are embedding innovation in their business practices, and that they have devoted both financial and staff resources to innovation. He says, “It’s surprising to me that more companies actually are putting people in positions of authority with respect to innovation. They are not necessarily new people; they are folks that are already on staff, but they also are carrying that [innovation] badge.”

Some of Tom Koulopoulos’s Innovation Zone Takeaways
 
Why Recession is an Opportune Time for Innovation

• There are more smart people out of work who will inevitably find themselves trying out ideas that may not have been embraced by their previous employers.
• Large companies that may have previously threatened start-ups by trampling on their innovative ideas are not preoccupied with larger issues of survival and tend to stay out of the way.
• Labor, office space, supplies – nearly everything you need to start a business – costs much less now.
• Technology has made it much easier for entrepreneurs to build a business and market their products or services.
• There are more unemployed individuals willing to take risks because they have nothing to lose.

Bio
Tom Koulopoulos is the founder of the Delphi Group, a 20-year-old Boston-based thought leadership firm providing advice on leading edge technologies to global 2000 organizations and government. He sold Delphi to Perot Systems in 2004 and today serves as managing director of a global innovation lab.
 
During the past two decades Tom Koulopoulos' works have introduced core industry concepts, frameworks, and vernacular that describe the impact of technology on business. These things include Single Point of Access, Touch Points, Digital Control Rooms, Business Operating Systems, Corporate IQ, Information Value Chains, and Smartsourcing.

InformationWeek named him one of the industry's most influential information management consultants. Koulopoulos’ insights on the implications of IT on global organizations frequently appear in national and international print and broadcast media, such as BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Economist, CNBC, CNN and NPR.

Tom Koulopoulos' eight books include: Smartsourcing, Corporate Instinct, Smart Companies, Smart Tools, and The X-economy.

Tom Koulopoulos has also been an adjunct professor at the Boston College Wallace E. Carroll Graduate School of Management and a guest lecturer at the Boston University School of management and Harvard University. He is the former director of the Babson Center for Business Innovation.

Resources
Podcast -Tom Koulopoulos on Unemployment, Innovation & the PUMA Personal Transportation Vehicle from Segway & GM - The Wall Street Journal Online
Outsourcing According to Tom Koulopoulos - Wisconsin Technology Network
Architecture & Process keynote: Tom Koulopoulos

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

In this podcast, Vass talks about technology trends in the federal government and the way Sun helps businesses market to the federal government.

Many IT leaders talk about the challenges of going from the private sector to the public sector. Bill Vass would prefer to dispute this. He has successfully fused experiences in both areas to become a key technology driver at Sun Microsystems. He joined Sun after holding several key IT positions in the Office of the CIO for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. At Sun, Vass quickly moved up the ranks to become the company’s CIO. In 2007, Vass became president and chief operating office of Sun Microsystems Federal. It is one of Sun’s fastest growing business units.

Vass consistently works with CIOs at the largest federal agencies to implement a wide variety of information technologies that will reduce costs and increase productivity.  His staff of 800 works primarily with private sector systems integrators to provide the appropriate solutions. He says, “These people make a lot of the technical, product, and architectural decisions. Sun doesn’t compete with systems integrators such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Our federal business is based on partnerships. We partner with channel partners. We partner with all major systems integrators, as well as small systems integrators. We help everyone we work with to become successful.”

Under pressure to keep IT costs down, most federal government agencies have begun to focus on open source technologies. In fact, Sun Microsystems Federal has the goal of becoming the best highly scalable, low-cost open source software and hardware provider. Vass says, “We know we can support the federal government’s Web 2.0 deployments and the consolidations happening in the federal government.”

Because Sun is one of the largest contributors to the open source community, Vass and his team have worked hard to get that message out to the federal government. He says, “Everything we have is either open source or is in the process of going in that direction. Our products have the lowest power cost per thread. Our operating systems are the least expense to deploy and maintain. We even support and sell Windows and Linux products. We have enabled all of our development tools to support Web 2.0. Our role-based, visual Web services enable you to use open source technology to put together role-based portals, such as MySpace. We also provide delivery to mobile devices and centralized messaging. Sun gives the user the security of open source and the stability of knowing that they can get support from anyone.”

Bio
William (Bill) Vass is president and chief operating office for Sun Microsystems Federal. He formerly was chief information officer of Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he was responsible for all aspects of Sun's global IT infrastructure and line-of-business application development, support, and maintenance, including information service delivery and security. While at Sun, Vass also has served as chief security officer and vice president of corporate software services.

Before joining Sun, Vass worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Office of the CIO, where he directed three large sectors of the Department of Defense's (DoD) IT infrastructure and represented DoD to Congress, the White House, and other nations. Before joining the Office of the CIO, Vass was chief technology officer and technical lead fir Army personnel systems.

Resources
Bill Vass on the Sun Microsystems You Thought You Knew - ExecutiveBiz
Top IT Issues - Bill Vass, President of Sun Microsystems Federal - Government Computer News
Bill Vass – Different Tasks, Different Chips - Government Computer News
Sun CIO Backs Blog Despite Lawyers’ Worries - ZDnet

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