Tim Martin, CTO at Audible, joins host Maryfran Johnson for this CIO Leadership Live interview, jointly produced by CIO.com and the CIO Executive Council. They discuss business resiliency, digital media competition, customer behavior pivots and more.
Careers, CIO, CIO Leadership Live
I am responsible for all technology across Liberis, and currently as an interim looking after product development.
This means ensuring that all of our technology services are running to plan, supporting our business and customers, and running efficiently and to the required level of performance.
As well as ensuring the smooth running of business as usual, there is the development of new product features, the onboarding of new partners and geographical expansion that has to be supported by the product and technology teams. Add to this the architectural enhancement, the integration of new innovations and ensuring that we are a product and technology-led organisation, every day brings a new and exciting challenge.
For example, at the moment, we are building an end-to-end, one-click embedded finance journey. We’re streamlining the application process, evidence collection, quoting, decisioning, and funding – in order to provide funds into a customer’s account in hours. We’re using advanced architectural structures to deliver a fully API-enabled set of services that can be embedded in a partners ecosystem.
When I was very young, my family moved to Africa – which was truly a life-enhancing experience. I grew up away from my entire family so it taught me adaptability at a young age. When you enter a class full of people in a strange country, and with a completely different culture, it can be very daunting, so you learn all sorts of techniques to survive. On my return to the UK, there was a mismatch in the education I had received and the available syllabus, so I had to look for an alternative path. I wasn’t able to follow the traditional route of A-Levels and onto university to get a degree, as I didn’t have the requisite base knowledge.
Fortunately, I was able to join an organisation at the ground level and be trained in each new role. I am happy to see the uptake of apprenticeships now as I really believe that learning from the bottom-up gives you a much more rounded skillset.
This is how I found myself in the technology industry and my route has since been fairly traditional, as I progressed through development, architecture, project management and then into leadership roles.
Since joining Liberis, we have practically doubled in size and I am very proud to be part of the team to help realise this incredible business growth – and this is only just the start.
In addition, in the last 12 months, I have been working as a mentor for a start-up accelerator. This involves me giving up time to talk to founders and advise them on their technology and product decisions.
It is incredible how many people have such passion about their ideas and give up so much to try and launch them into a successful business. Starting a company is exhausting both emotionally and mentally and requires incredible self-belief and resilience. It is an honour to help these founders in even the smallest way on their journey.
Outside of work, I have an active life doing high-intensity training and yoga. I am a jigsaw puzzle addict and find this to be a fabulous stress management tool.
I love visiting new countries and exploring different cultures; I visited the walled city of Dubrovnik in one of the brief gaps between COVID-19 lockdowns and was privileged to have been there when it was almost empty. It gave me the opportunity to walk around freely and enjoy the history of the town and the magnificence of the buildings. I love cities and I can never get bored of New York and London.
When I get a chance, I love painting large abstract bright and colourful pictures. I have been to many workshops and worked on many varieties of pictures including a large nude portrait – very tame and decent – but I prefer abstract art. I am also an avid networker and supporter/mentor of start-ups.
It came pretty late in my career but a wonderful lady that I worked with at Vodafone said ‘do not sit back and let your career happen’; you need a plan that you actively manage the same as any other kind of project in life.
Once I started doing this, I took control of my career, which was so incredibly empowering. As a result, I was much more selective about what I wanted to achieve and the results have been incredibly rewarding.
Financial Services Industry, IT Leadership
By Andy Nallappan, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software Business Operations, Broadcom Software
This article was originally published here by Andy Nallappan.
The enterprise software that underpins day-to-day operations is under significant strain at many organizations. Between the now-prevalent hybrid cloud architecture and ongoing digital transformation efforts, entire industries are experiencing tectonic shifts in how they do business and disruptions from new competitors. For IT leaders, these changes have heightened their focus on software modernization.
Software modernization is an imperative for many organizations, including Broadcom Software, because existing applications and other technologies might be incompatible with today’s flexible and agile open-system platforms, which can empower companies to quickly and more easily pivot to new business models and scale to meet demand. Modern software can enable business transactions and workflows to be executed with the highest levels of security and compliance, while delivering the compelling customer and employee experiences that users have come to expect. Moreover, faced with the costs associated with maintaining applications and infrastructure and an ongoing IT skills shortage, many enterprise IT leaders are searching for ways to use automation to bring speed to standard processes and clear the decks for their people to pursue higher-value work.
By embracing a modernization strategy, companies can transform their enterprise software portfolio with a next-generation technology stack, including a scalable, cloud-native environment, to drive new processes and collaborative workflows. This strategy can also set the stage for continuous innovation, enabling companies to optimize with data and deliver exceptional experiences that elevate products and services, create customer and employee loyalty, and burnish the corporate brand.
Software modernization is delivering synergies and efficiencies across business units and product portfolios. – Broadcom Software CTO Andy Nallappan
We appear to be at a tipping point, with industry rallying around software modernization as a path necessary for ongoing business growth. According to one estimate, the global market for application transformation, valued at $8.43 billion in 2019, is expected to grow steadily at a compound annual growth rate of 10.4% from 2020 to 2027, fueled by increasing digitalization, the worldwide rise of the internet and mobile devices, and growing reliance on big data.
My organization, Broadcom Software, set out on our software modernization journey for a variety of reasons, including the need to bolster product resiliency, reduce the chance of outages, and improve our time-to-delivery cycle for releasing new capabilities and applications. Yet the most important driver was to reimagine, deliver, and support our portfolio as an integrated bundle of software rather than a series of one-off point solutions assembled from prior acquisitions. Re-architecting around a modern software platform would enable better delivery across our entire portfolio and provide more consistency and ease of integration for individual applications. It would also create synergies and efficiencies for the different software business units and product portfolios. Indeed, standardizing on a common architecture and embracing new open systems-oriented engineering practices can be a good business practice for any growing company, delivering huge economies of scale — including a reduction in overhead — while simultaneously improving software efficiency.
We leaned into a number of important engineering practices to facilitate our software modernization journey. Among the most important were:
Adopted Google Cloud as a uniform, scalable, cloud-agnostic platform for product development to deliver rapid elasticity when catering to huge spikes in request ingestion for products reaching up to 1 million requests per second. Moreover, this practice was essential for refactoring the products according to a containerization framework that leverages Docker and Kubernetes.Embraced transformative DevOps practices to increase agility and software quality through automation of workflows.Supported a DevSecOps “shift-left” approach to integrate security at every level of the systems development life cycle, which helps us identify vulnerabilities before they reach production. DevSecOps addresses two common problems: It holds people accountable to security issues upfront, which can reduce the number of cycles needed to improve software, and better protects the software supply chain.Increased commitment to operational efficiency through real-time observability, proactive alerting, and automation remediation. In lieu of individual product silos, common operations such as cloud management, infrastructure as code, and software-as-a-service provisioning are addressed through a horizontal, standardized software operations group that transcends products. That liberates individual product teams to focus on product features and roadmaps, which helps create better customer experiences, and appeals to more experienced talent, ultimately fostering more effective recruitment and retention.
Broadcom Software has made significant investments in partnerships to drive this software modernization transformation and devoted 18 months to executing our roadmap. We’ve scaled our cloud proxy to 50 data centers worldwide and believe new businesses are now more easily integrated into our portfolio, our products are more secure, and our customers are more satisfied than ever. The journey has not been without its challenges, but the overall outcome is clear: We feel better positioned to execute on our bold vision and to empower our customers to achieve their business goals, drive innovation, and soar to new heights.
To learn more about how Broadcom Software can help you modernize, optimize, and protect your enterprise, contact us here.
Broadcom Software
About Andy Nallappan:
Andy is the Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software Business Operations for Broadcom Software. He oversees the DevOps, SaaS Platform & Operations, and Marketing for the software business divisions within Broadcom.
IT Leadership, Software Providers
Puneesh Lamba, CTO of apparel manufacturing company Shahi Exports, has always been a go-getter. In his first job as a graduate engineer trainee at manufacturing conglomerate Escorts Limited, Lamba was posted in the field after only eight months of training, which otherwise took one year. He again displayed his professional strengths when, he said, “in record time of less than four years, I was promoted to area manager, a position normally acquired after working for seven to eight years.”
However, Lamba says his biggest professional achievement has been the “regular disruption of self.” It was this ability to continuously disrupt that made Lamba pivot from a career in sales to one in technology.
In a conversation with CIO India, Lamba discusses how his self-disruption and risk-taking led to better results in the IT organizations he has led and in the business outcomes at his organisations, holding lessons for other technology leaders to consider.
CIO India: You started your career with sales and marketing. Why and how did you decide to get into technology?
Lamba: While at Escorts, I was increasingly getting bored with my profile in sales.
Finally, I met the sales and marketing head and requested him to take me away from the monotonous job of selling products and growing vertically from regional manager to general manager yet doing similar things in more geographies.
Fortunately, when an opportunity presented itself in a couple of months, he remembered me. The company had decided to implement an ERP solution and was putting together a team to lead this highly significant project. So, he called back and asked me if I wanted to be a part of this team. I asked him about the details of the project, and he arranged a meeting with the consultants for my better understanding. After the meeting, I accepted the offer. That’s how my journey started in technology.
CIO India: What has been your greatest career achievement till date? Why do you rank it at the top?
Lamba: Regular disruption of self and creation of the startup ecosystem for my organisation are two achievements that I value the most.
I kept on disrupting myself whenever I started getting into a comfort zone. From sales and marketing, I moved to ERP. From there I moved to business analytics and custom apps and then into a global consulting role. Then I moved to internal IT, becoming the CIO of Bilt, a billion-dollar organisation manufacturing writing and printing paper. which was an extremely brave (and on the borderline of stupidity) move by me as it was again an unchartered space for me.
Accepting challenging assignments that other colleagues were wary to attempt had become a habit and I strongly believe that disrupting myself always kept me on my toes and prevented rustiness to creep in.
In 2016, when startups were still a new breed and companies were taking a cautious approach to work with them, I started creating an ecosystem after identifying what technologies are important for us in our roadmap. I contacted NASSCOM, the nongovernmental trade association and advocacy group focused on India’s technology industry, to share the list of startups and their solutions and services in our identified technologies. I shortlisted some startups, shared the objectives of this exercise with the business leaders, and then called in all of them one day where startups presented their solutions for us to pick and choose from.
The exercise, which started in 2016, helped us create an ecosystem for our organisation. Over the next few years, it helped us to come up with multiple solutions that enabled our company to grow, deliver faster, and remain competitive. It gave me a satisfaction of giving something back to the society by supporting small startups. Later, it also became my learning ground to keep abreast with next-gen technologies and use cases from multiple industry verticals. Also, I started mentoring some of them, and more importantly cocreating solutions with them for solving our business problems.
CIO India: As a technology leader, what was the toughest decision you took? Why does it qualify as the toughest, and what was the outcome of the decision?
Lamba: One of the toughest decisions that I took as a CIO was to choose between outsourcing the information technology activities to an IT company and shift my team to their rolls or to keep everything inhouse. There were merits and pitfalls in both the approaches. While outsourcing promised a more organised, skilled, and service-level-agreement-oriented approach, keeping them in house offered more flexibility.
I had long deliberations internally and sought opinions from consultants and other CIOs. Finally, I decided to keep a hybrid approach where a few strategic roles were kept within my team and all operational and monitoring roles were outsourced to our partner.
I can safely say today that the decision paid off in creating a service organization, which functioned faster, better, and in a more economical fashion. Over the course of four years, we ended up saving more than ₹5 crores (₹50 million), besides getting a mature model for future.
CIO India: Tell us about a time when you acted on a new idea. How did you translate that idea into an action plan and eventually achieve outcomes?
Lamba: Cybersecurity has always been a challenge as the talent available on the dark side of the web is much greater and smarter than that available on the light side. The pace of innovation for hacking our systems has been outpacing the innovation in defending, and that is the reason all of us are playing catchup and are reacting to the attacks.
One of the ideas that I tried around seven years back was whitelisting instead of blacklisting. Whitelisting is the opposite of blacklisting, wherein a list of trusted entities such as websites and applications is created and allowed to function in the network.
While it was a painful and long process, which increased our own work as and when a new credential was established, it worked very well. It was a simple, back-to-basics, low-cost solution that served the organisation very well. Zero trust is actually a newer form of whitelisting and has been presented these days as an effective manner to prevent attacks.
CIO India: What would you do differently in your career if you had a chance?
Lamba: I would have probably started my own company after spending four or five years in the corporate world. I was always interested in entrepreneurship and the risks and rewards that were part of the process. Though I had many ideas, I could never get the chance and could not muster the courage to take the plunge. Those days, the only way one could start a business was by taking loan from a bank as there was no concept of crowdfunding that is available for today’s startups.
CIO India: Business and technology are evolving fast. What are you doing to keep yourself relevant for the future?
Lamba: The startup ecosystem creation process exposed me to the wonderful world of risk takers and disruptors. These were the people who were not shy of challenging the status quo and reimagining business models. It has become my biggest source of learning lately. The trends, new technology use cases, and the nuances of technology are best learnt from this brilliant tribe of professionals.
Other than that, I always had a habit of creating a learning path for myself and then completing those courses to update my repertoire. This not only helps in my own knowledge upgrade but also motivates my team to go for the courses as they have an example in front of them.
The other sources of learning for me are conferences, round tables, peers, research analysts, and consultants. These expose us to different point of views and keep us abreast of what is happening outside our industry vertical and geography.
In addition to keeping abreast of new technology, it is also important to keep updating behavioral, influencing, and leadership skills.
I follow an unorthodox method here. I have learnt a lot from books, movies, and cricket. In fact, during my days at Kellogg School of Management, some of us had this pact that we will either write a book or create video content that is entertaining as well as educating in three years from that date and will share with each other. Seven of us did that. My contribution was my book The Shankh. It was my first book and surprisingly did very well against my expectations, so now I am getting more requests to come up with its sequel from my publishers. Let’s see if I have the content in my me to take the story further.
CTO
Integrating a new network after an acquisition can be a sizable headache for any CIO. But for Koch Industries, a $125 billion global conglomerate that has acquired five companies in two years, including Infor for $13 billion in 2020, connecting those acquisitions’ networks to its own sprawling network has been a challenge of another magnitude.
Traditionally, to integrate its acquisitions, Koch would flatten the acquired company’s core network, says Matt Hoag, CTO of business solutions at Koch. While this approach makes connecting the network easier, it is a slow, arduous endeavor that gets more complex as more companies are acquired, he says.
Moreover, Koch itself is in the middle of a digital transformation that adds cloud networking to the mix, further complicating the challenge. Cloud networking comprises three layers: first from on-premises data centers to the cloud, then within a cloud that has multiple accounts or virtual private clouds, and finally, between individual clouds in a multicloud environment. It’s more complicated than standard networking, Hoag says.
“Cloud deployments typically come in the form of multiple accounts, including multiple LAN segments that need to be connected. This encompasses not only VMs but also many other services offered by the cloud provider,” he says.
The major tasks involved range from deploying core IP routing, to enabling connections among virtual workloads within a multitenant cloud, to connecting multiple clouds, to ensuring remote users can connect to the company’s cloud estate. It’s the kind of challenge few, if any, enterprises can take on without a partner today, analysts contend.
Koch Industries began its migration to Amazon Web Services in 2015, when it also started on the first layer of its cloud networking strategy.
Matt Hoag, CTO of business solutions, Koch Industries
Koch Industries
Leased lines and direct connects would remain in the data center as part of this strategy, but Hoag did not want to route users through the data center to access data on the cloud. Instead, Koch’s engineering team set about virtualizing the physical transports to build the SD-LAN and firewall within the cloud rather than in the data center.
The company invested a hefty amount of time — roughly 18 months — and engineering resources just to bring on-premises networking to the cloud. “It was more of a challenge than I thought it was going to be in the early days,” Hoag says.
For the second two layers of Koch’s cloud network infrastructure, Hoag partnered up with a specialist.
IDC analyst Brad Casemore notes that there are several multicloud networking suppliers, including Aviatrix, Alkira, F5 Networks, and Prosimo, as well as established datacenter SDN suppliers such as VMware, Cisco, and Juniper. Co-location providers that offer interconnection-oriented architectures — such as Equinix, Digital Realty, and CoreSite — partner with many of these suppliers.
Hoag brought in Alkira to help tackle the challenge.
When building out one portion of a transport construct, the CTO recalls an ‘aha’ moment that he had one afternoon in a conference room in Reno, Nev., with Alkira: Using a third-party platform to handle the abstraction of networking into a software service would vastly reduce the complexity for his own IT team.
Alkira’s network segmentation and resource sharing approach would enable Koch to unify its on-premises and multicloud networks with a few clicks of the mouse, Hoag says. So his team set about migrating the first layer of cloud networking it built from scratch to work within Alkira’s platform.
“Prior to Alkira, anytime we acquired a new company, it would take 12 to 24 months to integrate their network due to the massive complexity,” Hoag says. “Now, we can set policy and have the entire network abide within 24 hours.”
Hybrid and multicloud networking, such as Koch’s, represents the next level of cloud maturity, says IDC’s Casemore, who adds that it’s a category in which most enterprises are woefully behind.
“While compute and storage infrastructure have largely aligned with cloud principles and the needs of multicloud environments,” Casemore says, “the network has not kept pace. ”
For Casemore, network modernization is indispensable to multicloud success: “Enterprises often are not fully cognizant of their networks’ multicloud deficiencies and limitations until they experience them firsthand. By then, the network’s inability to accommodate new requirements has often compromised the realization of an organization’s digital business strategy,” he says.
Here, Hoag says, partnering can be beneficial, as third-party specialists such as Alkira have a deep understanding of cloud providers’ obscure but significant technical differences. Working with a partner can also vastly reduce maintenance and troubleshooting, Hoag says, adding that to date Koch is enjoying similar data transfer speeds in all three layers of its cloud networking architecture.
Koch’s partnership with Alkira has also enabled the CTO to build up his team’s cloud networking skills.
“There is a talent war going on,” Hoag says. “This helps us move our team up the talent chain so they can focus on working with applications teams in the company and produce much better business outcomes.”
Enterprise Management Associates analyst Shamus McGillicuddy agrees that most enterprise CIOs will need to tap a specialist to achieve seamless cloud networking — one of the final phases of their digital infrastructure.
“Building a network across multiple cloud providers and one or more private data centers is too complex because network and security teams have to use different tools depending on which cloud or data center they’re working with,” McGillicuddy says. “This solution is an overlay that removes this complexity.”
By abstracting the various networking and security features different cloud providers offer, enterprises “can manage everything from one place, with one set of design parameters, one set of network and security policies, and one console for operational monitoring and management,” he says.
One day, setting up cloud networking may be as easy as using a credit card to set up a cloud instance, Hoag says. But not now. “When you start to have the kind of user needs to potentially have connectivity between different clouds, that’s more difficult,” the CTO says.
Cloud Computing, Hybrid Cloud, Multi Cloud, Networking
An alarm sounds on the factory floor: a critical piece of equipment has malfunctioned. An engineer approaches the machine, scans its QR code, and immediately accesses visual step-by-step instructions for fixing the issue created by the people who work with the same machines every day.
This is SwipeGuide, a B2B cloud-based SaaS platform that captures and scales operational knowledge, helping teams in industrial environments to create, improve, and share instructions and standard operating procedures using mobile and wearable devices. The platform is designed to help reduce errors and downtime, improve the quality of products, and help onboard new employees – all powered by the expertise of frontline workers.
SwipeGuide Chief Technology Officer Sue Li has worked in the tech industry for over a decade, with a degree in educational technology and instructional design from Harvard University’s Technology, Innovation, and Education programme for her master’s degree. Li gained experience in visual art and UX design as well as product management and software development before joining SwipeGuide in 2019. Less than a year later, she was promoted from full-stack developer to CTO.
“I learn best through hands-on learning and just by tackling problems,” Li says. “My first year as a CTO involved learning a lot about the security and scalability of the infrastructure, data privacy, and compliance. Part of the learning process was figuring out how to ask the right questions and work with experts to solve very detailed and strategic problems.”
One of the challenges that Li contends with in her role is the ever-increasing volume of data that the platform produces, including content, feedback, usage, and behavioural data. Li is developing SwipeGuide’s new strategy to figure out how to manage it and how to put the data to work.
“The strategy that we want to go forward with is self-service analytics: how can we empower users on the factory floor so that they don’t need to rely on a data scientist or analyst to get insights? We want to have all of our data in a data warehouse as a single source of truth so that we can analyse and provide those insights to the operators. I think that’s going to be an important step towards having more robust machine learning models as well. It’s going to be very, very powerful.”
SwipeGuide is expanding its services beyond its European customers to the US and China, which presents the challenge of ensuring data privacy and compliance for an increasingly global audience.
Currently clients can access analytics dashboards on the platform that can show entities the adoption of their content, like how many instructions have been created over time by specific teams in different workspaces, and how often they’re viewed.
“We want to be able to provide better insights with those dashboards, and another part of that is embedding that data right into the platform itself: being able to see which guides have been the most popular and are the highest quality. Later on, we will be able to analyse which characteristics the highest-rated guides have, maybe something about the structure of how they are written or the structure of the images or videos. This is where machine learning will come in, to help us make recommendations to improve the quality of instructions over time.”
Life on the factory floor is changing rapidly with the onset of Industry 4.0, the fourth wave of the industrial revolution powered by data and bolstered by automation. Tools such as SwipeGuide aim to optimise operations by minimising downtime, but the insights needed to create smarter factories must come from human expertise first.
“Our work is all about empowering the frontline worker — the biggest waste is untapped human potential. I think that the problem that we’re trying to solve is all of the silent knowledge that people have: crowd-sourcing that knowledge from all the different operators and frontline workers, and then externalising and capturing that in a standard format that is easy to share,” Li says.
Contrary to popular imagery associated with Industry 4.0 – workers replaced by endless rows of indefatigable robots – Li believes that humans will have an important role to play. “There are very few smart factories out there where there is no human intervention,” Li says, citing an example of a car manufacturer in Japan that has an automated factory for building auto parts after figuring out the step-by-step instructions necessary for robots to execute those tasks.
“With the data processing power that we have now with edge computing and cloud computing, there will be a huge shift over the next 10 to 20 years in what can be automated. But in order to reach that level of automation, we need to be able to build algorithms: some of the questions we’re asking are can we emulate the procedures, can we create an algorithm with the instructions, and how can we hook performance data into operational data?”
Li and the SwipeGuide team are actively exploring other types of emerging technologies that work in harmony with the platform. The company is experimenting with wearable devices that will free up workers’ hands while they repair and service machinery.
SwipeGuide has created an Android app that can be installed on a durable industrial wearable like Realwear, which creates helmets and smart glasses built for factory settings. “We are also looking into compatibility with Google Glass,” Li says. “Wearables allow the operators to be completely hands-free when they’re repairing a machine or doing whatever they need to, which allows us to do more with voice commands.”
For more complex instructions, augmented reality can help workers understand specific gestures and motions that would be hard to describe with photos or text.
“We did a pilot with XM Reality, a remote support calling platform. If a worker gets stuck on a particular instruction, the remote experts can show users what needs to happen with augmented reality. Imagine, a worker has shared a real-time video of a part of a machine that is broken or loose, and they can see a hand on their screen making a motion or drawing a shape. Making the experience interactive can really help in situations where a course of action is very complicated and difficult to describe.”
The challenges that SwipeGuide is currently facing, like integrating new technologies and developing SwipeGuide’s data strategy and machine learning models, require fostering a culture of innovation within the team. For Li, the best inspiration for new ideas comes from the people who use the platform and the solutions come from her team: “I think our customers really know the most, so it’s important to get insights from the market, the users, and the customers. We do our own usability testing — for example, we created a small competition where we created step-by-step guides for creating origami. It helped us experience the challenges that our customers face while uploading images or making changes to instructions, for example.”
Li believes that an important part of innovation is having an agile mindset, especially when it comes to software development, to measure the effectiveness of a new solution or idea.
“We track events and collect data so that we can measure solutions in relation to specific goals, like increasing visibility or usage,” she says
“If it works we keep it, and if not we create another iteration of that solution and then try again. We work in an industry with huge enterprises that use the waterfall methodology, but I think that takes away from the innovation element of being able to experiment with smaller improvements, collect and learn from the feedback, and develop new and novel ways to solve problems.”
Industry, IT Leadership
DTN is more than just a weather forecaster: It also offers decision-support services to companies in agriculture, energy, commodities, and the finance industry. Its weather-related services can be as simple as helping utilities predict short-term demand for energy, or as complex as advising maritime transporters on routing ocean-going cargo ships around developing storms.
Over the years, DTN has bought up several niche data service providers, each with its own IT systems — an environment that challenged DTN IT’s ability to innovate.
“We had five different forecast engines running in the company through various acquisitions,” says Lars Ewe, who inherited the thorny IT environment when he joined as CTO in February 2020. “Very little innovation was happening because most of the energy was going towards having those five systems run in parallel.”
The forecasting systems DTN had acquired were developed by different companies, on different technology stacks, with different storage, alerting systems, and visualization layers.
“They had one thing in common,” jokes Ewe: “They all were trying to predict the weather!”
Working with his new colleagues, he quickly identified rebuilding those five systems around a single forecast engine as a top priority.
Enterprises often make strategic errors when combining IT systems following an acquisition, Ewe says. “The number one mistake I see is, ‘Since we acquired you, clearly we win,’” he says. “Just because A bought B, you don’t want to assume that A has better technology than B.”
Another common mistake is to go solely by the numbers, picking one company’s IT system over the other’s because it has the highest revenue or profitability, he says: “The issue there is that you’re oversimplifying the process.”
Given the investment in time and money necessary to merge two companies’ IT systems, “it’s worthwhile spending an extra few weeks up-front to make a more thorough analysis of which solution or which pieces of which solutions should come together,” Ewe says. Jumping straight in and making a wrong decision can cost more in the long term.
Ewe consulted with product and sales management, and with customers, to identify the needs DTN’s single engine would have to satisfy, as well as the use cases it would serve, before evaluating the existing assets against those needs. He had other requirements as well, including that the system should run in the cloud. To ensure the success of the decision-making process, Ewe brought together the staff who were running each of the forecasting systems into one team.
“You’re starting with five teams, and everyone thinks that their baby is the best baby, and the other babies are all ugly. It’s natural,” he says. Also natural, he adds, is fear among IT workers that their employment is tied to the continued existence of the system they maintain.
To combat that, Ewe emphasized the potential for growth from the start. “We have so much opportunity here that there’s more than one solution where we can apply their talent,” he says, noting that there would be plenty of work building analytics and insight tools around whichever forecasting engine was chosen.
A succession of team-building exercises helped develop a trusted environment where staff saw themselves as part of the larger whole, in which they were willing to discuss the disadvantages of the system they worked on, as well as its advantages. This enabled the team to select one engine to carry forward and to identify capabilities that the other engines offered that DTN should consider reimplementing in its selected platform, Ewe says.
For example, Ewe didn’t want to lose the data those other engines worked with. So he had it all cleaned up and consolidated into a common store. “Historical data is very important for weather prediction because it provides a feedback loop into the models,” he says.
DTN staff did much of the implementation work. “I am a firm believer in in-house resources. They’re just more motivated; they have more incentives to make things successful,” he says. “When you think about what skill sets do you need, it’s a broad spectrum: data engineering, data storage, scientific experience, data science, front-end web development, devops, operational experience, and cloud experience.”
DTN did rely on external help in building the high-performance computing infrastructure in the cloud, partnering with Amazon Web Services: “They realized that there was a real market for high-performance computing in the cloud, and they wanted to find a partner that actually had clear requirements, a clear mission and clear knowledge of high-performance computing,” he says.
The results exceeded Ewe’s expectations, doubling the throughput of the forecasting system to the point where DTN can now run global models hourly. “In fact, we don’t even schedule them. Usually these systems are batch-driven, they’re scheduled, and we’re now event-driven: When underlying data changes in a meaningful way, we kick off a new model compute. That is sensational.”
Ewe had to encourage other cultural changes in the team, beyond uniting it around one forecasting engine. “I had to help everyone understand that this engine we were building was just the underpinning of larger solutions that we were trying to build on top of that,” he says.
With access to easily scalable supercomputing resources, there’s a temptation to crank up the accuracy of the forecast model, but, as Ewe says, “You have to ask yourself, ‘Is what I’m now optimizing even having an impact on the consumption side?’”
In other words, is the output of the forecasting model good enough for customers’ use cases? That’s a tricky question, but easy to answer with the right data, he says: “You often can simulate it: If I were off by a half a degree, what impact would that even have on the ship routing algorithm?”
Some post-merger IT challenges could be avoided — or at least more easily planned and budgeted for — if IT weighed more heavily in the negotiation process leading up to an acquisition. But getting a seat at the merger negotiating table is a challenge for IT leaders: Such discussions are often conducted with the utmost secrecy.
At DTN, says Ewe, “We have a sophisticated due-diligence checklist for technology. There’s a lot in there, but it gives us more visibility up front of what it is that we’re trying to merge or integrate.”
Among the areas the checklist invites the negotiating team to consider, he says, are the talent, “because you are buying people just as much as you’re buying technology,” and the interdependencies of the IT systems, to get a sense of what is required for the merger to work.
“If you’re not part of the process, then you are at least represented through a mechanism, a process,” he says.
After going through the process a few times, CIOs should have the data to demonstrate how important a good IT match is in a successful merger, Ewe says, “and hopefully earn a seat at the table.”
Analytics, Data Management