Month: September 2016

Bask Iyer, CIO of VMware, once told me about the “CEO missing-out syndrome.” It goes like this:

Most CEOs really like their CIOs. “My CIO is great,” they say. “She has kept costs down, has secured our enterprise, and runs a highly available infrastructure. In fact, she has done everything I have asked her to do since I hired her five years ago. However, I feel like I’m missing out. What with all of that innovation coming out of Silicon Valley,” these CEOs worry, “I must be missing out on some really cool digital disrupter that my competitors have surely discovered.”

CEOs who suffer from the missing-out syndrome do one of three things:

• They anoint their CIO, formally or informally, as head of innovation and charge her with charting the company’s digital future.
• They fire their CIO and hire a new one who arrives all shiny with the promise of digital innovation.
• They gently push their trusted CIO to the operational margins and hire a chief digital officer (CDO), someone with a background in marketing, strategy, or product development to build and drive a digital roadmap.

This last move can spell real trouble for a company, says Iyer. “I’ve encountered many CDOs who can talk a good game,” he says. “They’ve read enough about digital technologies and have used enough mobile apps to convince the CEO that they are the right digital leader for the company. They come in and everyone loves them . . . for about six months. But they don’t really understand how to deliver technology change, so they flame out. A year later, they are gone, and it is the CIO who is left picking up the pieces.”

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Citigroup is using software-defined storage to build an infrastructure that could last 25 years – while generations of hardware come and go.

The financial services company needs to transform its storage architecture to deal with growing and changing demands, says Dan Maslowski, global head of storage and engineered systems. By simplifying its architecture, Citigroup expects to slash its operational expenses, which make up most of its storage costs.

Citigroup’s need for storage is growing so fast that if costs don’t go down, the company’s spending on storage might eat up its entire IT budget in a few years, Maslowski told an audience at the Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday.

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