CIOs face a common set of thorny challenges these days, namely the pressure to deliver innovations even as they seek to cut or hold down spending, according to an array of senior IT executives who spoke on Tuesday at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The customer always comes first. Except when it comes to HCL, the $6 billion Indian outsourcing -- make that co-sourcing -- giant led by CEO Vineet Nayar, who literally wrote the book on a philosophy known as 'employees first, customer second.' In this latest installment of our CEO Interview Series, Nayar spoke with IDG Enterprise Chief Content Officer John Gallant about how that philosophy is fueling HCL's rapid growth and why more CIOs ought to consider adopting it. Nayar also discussed how HCL has set its sights beyond competing with other Indian outsourcers like Infosys and Wipro and is squarely targeting what he believes are the many unhappy customers of services giants like IBM, Accenture and CSC. The outspoken Nayar took shots at the 'fear psychosis' created by services firms in trying to peddle their offerings and used a barnyard epithet to describe public cloud computing, which he claims isn't ready for prime time. He also outlined HCL's aggressive plans for hiring locally in the U.S. and Europe, and defended the company's use of the controversial H-1B visa program. In addition, Nayar talked about the new goals for IT departments in 2012 and beyond, and explained why treating mobile as a technology 'misses the point.'

An expensive and long-troubled software program for California's pension system that went live last year has stumbled out of the gate, with some areas of service dealing with significant and growing backlogs, according to a report released Tuesday by officials at the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS).

Although most end users never get a clear view of the infrastructure underlying the services they consume via Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, Accenture Research Manager Huan Liu recently estimated that a whopping 454,400 individual blade servers are currently being used to power that product.

Using remote monitoring technology to keep tabs on patients' blood sugar and cardiopulmonary disease can reduce the risk of patient mortality by up to 45%, according to a U.K. Department of Health study.

Faced with the continued commoditization of servers, IT vendors this year will try to differentiate their offerings by moving toward more highly integrated, unified compute platforms.