CIO Tech Talk Wrapup – Westcon Group’s Bill Hurley

In the most recent of our CIO Tech Talks last Friday, we spoke with Bill Hurley, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice-President of Westcon Group, Inc. a leading international technology distributor. In a lively discussion moderated by Tom McCoy, former CIO of American International Group (AIG) a lot of ground was covered on a variety of hot topics. Here are some of the highlights of that conversation:

Virtualization

• Westcon started down the path of virtualization as a way to make sure older, legacy applications were protected and stayed alive.
• They quickly realized the business benefits including server consolidation, easier management, substantially improved uptime, better handling of usage spikes, vastly improved response times and improved environment mobility.
• They put together a business plan with budget and ROI projections and have been actively virtualizing their infrastucture over the past several years.
• Consolidated from 325 servers down to 22 (almost a 15 to 1 reduction), with accompanying improvements in internal processes
• They have faced some challenges, especially when moving applications to a virtualized environment that have never been there before, but overall it has been a tremendous success for the organization.

Mobility

• When it comes to smartphones and tablets, Westcon like most other businesses are workng to bring them on-board. As Bill said, “you can’t keep them out”, and as Tom replied, “If you try, you’ll probably be the one on the way out!”.
• Bill feels these devices are opening up worlds of opportunity in the Unified Communications realm, by improving connectivity and capability.
• Westcon is starting to test Skype at the enterprise-level and looking into ways to make that part of their communications platform
• Interstingly, they have been having better luck with Android devices that iOS devices. Executives prefer them as they stay fully functional when not connected to a network and IT finds them more open from an App development perspective.

Cloud Strategy

• Westcon has been executing on a hybrid-cloud model (mostly private-cloud, some public-cloud)
• They moved Exchange to a public cloud provider (SaaS – Software as a Service) as that is an application that is vital but is not creating competitive advantage for the organization. Custom and mission-critical applications have remained in the private cloud.
• The Exchange migration has been very effective. It has resulted in “huge” cost savings and uptimes that are “better than when internally managed”. They have also been very pleased with the security offerings from their cloud-partner, including anti-spam, anti-malware and virus protection.
• Although their 3rd party cloud provider offers a very high uptime guarantee (99.9+%), he warned that this does not mean the service will always be fast or efficient. They have experienced sluggish response on several occasions, while the service was not technically “down”.
• They have also moved their development environments to the cloud (PaaS – Platform as a Service). This has also been successful, but not without its challenges. One issue was that the developers could set up their own development environment in a few minutes on the cloud, but there was no consistency or standards in how they were doing this. This came back to bite them and they had to develop ‘environment standards’ so that they had consistency going forward.
• Prior to moving financials, operational or mission-critical applications to the web, Bill would like to see more maturity in the cloud-model, including billing, and clarity around where exactly his data is stored and managed in a shared cloud environment.

Social Media

Bill is a big believer in the benefits of social media in thinks it is here to stay. Some aspects of social media he focused on included:

• Listening - paying attention to what your customers and prospects are saying about your organization on-line. There is a lot to learn and you can proactively respond to any issues and get in front of them.
• Ethics. He believes that the HR department has a role to play in laying out ethical guidelines relative to how employees interact on social networks
• Usage – There is a real risk of over usage of social networks in the workplace and resultant loss of productivity. Bill sees this as a management issue that needs to be addressed head on.
• Crowd-Sourcing – Bill also discussed the new trend of development crowd-sourcing. Using social networks to engage developers in an application development project. They are testing this now and having some very positive results.

Thanks to Bill and Tom for providing such a lively and informative conversation. We appreciate their time and insights, and they have set the bar high for future participants in upcoming Carousel CIO Tech Talks.

If you would like to join in our next CIO Tech Talk, contact us with your contact information (name, company, title, email) and we will add you to our invitation list.