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, Mike Karp, VP and Principal Analyst at Ptak-Noel Associates and founder of Infrastructure Analytics, talks about how technology trends, such as cloud computing and virtualization, will continue to reshape enterprise storage, and what CIOs must know to take advantage of these trends.

How does both cloud computing computer and virtualization change enterprise storage? According to Mike Karp, a former storage analyst for Enterprise Management Associates and the Hurwitz Group, says that these technologies will profoundly change storage at all levels – from the enterprise of global companies to small businesses. He says that it is important to keep in mind that there is a continuum here. “Virtualization differs from cloud computing.  In fact, virtualization provides a path to cloud computing. You can go from virtualization to private clouds to public clouds, or you can do just one of them or a mix of them. You typically see hybridization or hybrid architectures. Virtualization enables a great deal of mobility for where you store your data, applications or where your processing resides. You are not restricted to a particular type of hardware. The mobility of the application and the processing enables you to move from one virtual environment to another one instanteously.”

In this podcast, Karp, the founder of Infrastructure analytics, a research firm that focuses on how storage networking fits into the organization’s overall infrastructure, talks about the following:

• how have both cloud computing and virtualization changed enterprise storage,
• what pros and cons emerge in the move to each one of these technologies,
• what type of impact these technologies will have on disaster recovery, and
• what changes CIOs must prepare for when they move to these technologies.

Bio

Michael Karp is the founder of Infrastructure Analytics. He spent nine years as the senior analyst for the storage networking practice at Enterprise Management Associates. Here he consulted with vendors on technologies ranging from data reduction to cloud computing. For about six years, he wrote the twice weekly Storage in the Enterprise newsletter for NetworkWorld. Before EMA he was director of storage technologies for Hurwitz Group.

He also has held senior technology leadership positions at Bellcore/Telcordia Technologies and Microelectronics/Symbios Logic/LSI. He was a doctoral candidate in systems management at Colorado Technical University. He also has written about storage networking for a number of computer trade publications, including CIO Update, Computerworld, Enterprise Storage Forum, and TechRepublic.

Resources

Mike Karp's Website

http://www.storagekilter.com

IT, Get Smart About Smart Device Disposal, Internet Evolution

http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=630&doc_id=169627

EMC Looks at Clouds From Both Sides Now, Internet Evolution

http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=630&doc_id=154548

Computerworld Articles by Mike Karp

http://www.computerworld.com.au/author/678536099/mike_karp/articles

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer

Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Seventy-six per cent of executives surveyed at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in May 2008 said they didn't have a committed budget for a greening policy, even though 90 percent said that greening their data centers is crucial to meeting their companies' business objectives. This wasn't the case for Avnet Inc., $14 billion worldwide distributor of electronic components, computer products, and technology services. In fact, Avnet received Computerworld's Best Practices in Green IT Award for a three-year project to create a more energy-efficient data center.

Avnet's 13,000 square foot data center houses 1,200 logical servers, more than 200 terabytes of disk storage, a central tape backup system, and redundant UPSs, generators, and switch gear. For Brad Kenney, vice president of infrastructure at Avnet, the greening of the company's data center wasn't another IT project, but an on-going process that has saved the company thousands of dollars in unnecessary power consumption, under-utilized servers, and inefficient UPSs. He says, "Most of all it's saved us the millions of dollars it would cost to build out our data center to house more servers we didn't need."

Kenney begin the process by looking at every piece of equipment on the data center floor. Two important factors included the age of the device and its energy efficiency. Because manufacturers have become more concerned about energy consumption, Kenney found it more cost-effective to replace older air conditioners and older UPSs with new devices that were at least 20 percent more energy efficient. He even looked at replacing floor tiles, lighting, and making adjustments in air handling. He says that little things like these can save up to 30 percent in energy consumption.

Server virtualization enabled Kenney to liquidate about 300 severs. Twenty-four physical ESX hosts now represent 378 virtual servers, and 39 AIX servers have more than 200 servers on them. Other consolidated efforts include moving to a centralized tape backup system and a storage area network.

Kenney is also amazed by the improved energy consumption that has resulted from virtualization, as well as from the other system consolidations. He says, "We went down by 44 percent in kWs per server. We've freed up more than 5,000 square feet on the data center floor."

Bio
Since 2004, Brad Kenney has been vice president of IT infrastructure at Avnet Inc., where he oversees the data center facility, computer operations, desktops, data storage, networks, messaging, and mainframes. Kenney started his career with Avnet in 1987 and has served in a variety of positions, including supervisor, manager, and director of data center operations. He received a B.S. in Computer Information Systems from Arizona State University.

Resources
The Data Center Journal - Blade.org Establishes Venture Capital Advisory Board to Guide Blade Standard and Future Solutions
Purchasing.com - Avnet Gets Green Certification
ChannelWeb - Avnet Adds Virtualization to Growing Services Portflio

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