Interviews

Saar Gillai, named head of Hewlett-Packard's Cloud operations in January, is on the hot seat.

Should you trade your clear-cut written outsourcing contract for a simpler agreement and a handshake with your IT services provider? Thomas Young from Information Services Group (ISG) says you should consider what he calls 'evolutionary contracting'.

With software-defined networking the control of the network is pried out of the data handling devices and centralized on a controller that uses a common protocol, OpenFlow, to direct the switches on the southbound side. That much has been established. But what of the oft-mentioned northbound APIs that will let applications tell the controller what they need from the network? What kind of progress is the Open Networking Foundation making on that front? Network World Editor in Chief John Dix put the question to Robert Sherwood, CTO of Big Switch Networks and head of the ONF's Architecture and Framework Working Group, which is responsible for multiple things, including the creation of these northbound APIs.

John Swainson has one of the more challenging jobs in the tech industry right now. As president of Dell's software division, he's charged with sorting through all the software Dell has acquired and organizing it into coherent offerings that can further its effort to become a more profitable, software- and services-driven company.

As co-president of Oracle, Mark Hurd is tasked with selling an ever-increasing array of new software and hardware products, such as the Exadata database machine and Fusion Applications, while figuring out how to keep the company's vast installed base happy and fending off competition from the likes of SAP.

Emmile Brack leads the IT department at Aspire Public Schools, a nonprofit organization that manages 34 public charter schools throughout California. The system serves 12,000 mostly low-income students in kindergarten through 12th grade, and its goal is to get all graduating seniors accepted into four-year colleges. Brack is Aspire's vice president of technology. She says her department's task is to make sure Aspire's 1,500 employees and its students have the technology needed to transform the students' educational experiences. Brack says one way her team is meeting this goal is by deploying analytics tools. Here she talks about the lessons she has learned from that project.

A "bring your own support" movement is sprouting up within BYOD programs as employees become more self-sufficient. Is this a death knell for the IT help desk? One possible savior: an enterprise Genius Bar.

As any CIO knows, an executive position is enough to fill up one's time. But Greg Taffet, CIO at U.S. Gas & Electric, felt a need to contribute his time and skills to another important IT endeavor: expanding access to technology in his Florida community. Taffet volunteers with the South Florida Digital Alliance, a group of area businesses and charitable organizations working to provide technology and Internet access to people who can't afford them. Here he talks about the digital divide, his work to bridge it, and what he has learned about leadership.

Since its introduction, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface has created a fair amount of controversy. UEFI was created through an industry consortium as an evolutionary step up from BIOS, the simple firmware long used when starting a computer to initialize all the components and load the operating system. Among its advanced features, UEFI includes an option called Secure Boot, which requires that any software used before the operating system starts, or after it shuts down, has been signed by a certificate authority.

There's no easy path to iPad adoption and a bogged-down iPad pilot program can spell disaster. Apple could be more helpful to businesses, but there are ways to simplify complicated iPad migrations. Here's what a tech services firm learned while helping Cablevision configure 3,000 iPads.

NetSuite is one of the SaaS (software as a service) market's pioneers, having sold its growing family of ERP (enterprise resource planning), e-commerce and other applications since 1998. The vendor's results have been beating Wall Street's predictions, and may yet again in a few weeks, when NetSuite is expected to announce its fourth-quarter and year-end results.

For Dell Software CIO Carol Fawcett, "BYOD" is not about being an expert on every mobile device in the world; it's about giving workers secure access to the apps and data they need on whatever device they are using.

"Faster, better, cheaper," the old adage goes. "Pick two." Indeed, in many areas of IT outsourcing, IT leaders have been pushing for faster everything--RFP processes, transition phases, time to ROI--in an effort to cut costs quickly.

Has the concept of IT outsourcing outlived its effectiveness? KPMG's Cliff Justice says the process that the term was invented to describe has evolved considerably and finding value in IT service providers is taking on new meaning.

Complacency has no takers in IT. Technology, by its very nature, is a sign of progress and that means IT leaders can't rest on their laurels. They need to constantly develop their skills to stay relevant. Shweta Rao spoke to Srinibash Sahoo, SVP and head-technology, DSP BlackRock Investment Managers, to find out how he's doing just that.

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a well-established server-side dynamic language platform for Web development. Among its many users have been important Web properties such as SugarCRM and the Drupal content management system. Perhaps the top promoter of PHP is Zend Technologies, which offers an application server and development tools for PHP and stresses PHP usage in enterprises.

Over the last five years or so, more organizations have used social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate with customers. Now many organizations are taking a cue from those sites to deploy more socially minded communication and collaboration tools. Does taking a more social, collaborative approach work?

With 2012 revenues of $4.1 billion, Electronic Arts (EA) is the third-largest video game company in the world by revenue behind only Nintendo and Activision Blizzard. It boasts landmark franchises such as Madden NFL, FIFA, The Sims and Mass Effect. Through its PopCap Games subsidiary it is the publisher of hits like Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies. And yet, in June of 2012, EA's chief operating officer compared the company to a burning oil platform.

Orlando Health VP and CIO Rick Schooler talks about how analytics is transforming healthcare. Insider (registration required)

A Dartmouth faculty member suggests that CIOs can get fresh ideas from emerging economies, but it requires a new way of thinking