IT has not been challenged sufficiently: Bask Iyer, CIO, VMware

In an era of digitization, VMware is looking to transform itself into a player beyond its dominant image of virtualization, and is seeking to position itself as an end to end solutions provider. This positioning has helped the firm diversify its revenues. For example, in Q1, standalone vSphere license bookings were less than 35% of total license bookings – a strong indicator of growth coming from an expanded set of product offerings from VMware such as NSX, EUC, vSAN and vCloud Air.

With VMware in rapid expansion mode, its CIO, Bask Iyer, is playing a crucial role in the company’s transformation. As Iyer leads VMware’s global information and technology organization (a group that manages critical technology systems supporting the company’s worldwide business operations), his team is the first sounding board and the first customer for any new technology before the company releases it externally. Express Computer caught up with Bask Iyer, who explains his key challenges as a CIO, and why he believes that IT teams must be challenged more for innovation to thrive.

Some edited excerpts:
What are your biggest challenges as a CIO?

I think the biggest challenge still continues to be attracting the best talent, because in IT what I tell people is you can buy every software that everybody sells, I mean you can buy what VMware sells, Microsoft sells, Google sells, Amazon sells, the decision is not just buying the tools or the software or the hardware, it is available for a lot of folks to buy, it is how do you actually implement it.

To implement that you need to have the best talent and in IT, I always believe one person can do the job of a 1,000 people and most CIOs and more IT professionals look at their team as if they have more people, then they feel more empowered and they think they can get a lot done.

I actually think it is the opposite, sometimes having a lot of people in your team prevents you from moving fast and IT industry is full of people who have done the job of 10,000 people. If you look at Linux very few people started that, MS-DOS was started by Bill Gates and Apple was founded by a couple of people, VMware was founded by a couple of people, Juniper was founded by Pradeep Sindhu and a few other people. So the history of technology companies has a lot of revolutions, lot of major technology has been founded with a small team. So talent becomes the most important thing, it is not the number of people you have, it’s the kind of people you have. So that’s the biggest challenge and as we go forward it is going to get even worse because the same people I have is what everybody else seems to want.

So one of the things I have learned after a long time is in IT one person can do the work of 1,000 people, but you need to get the special person who can do the work of 1,000 people. Every other technology company, everybody seems to want to get the same person– for example, if you pick something like cloud computing there is a finite number of people who know how to do cloud computing. Lot of people have titles to say that they are running cloud computing because they just call the datacenter job as cloud now and people are saying that’s cloud, but in truth there are very, very few people who know how to run a cloud system, a private cloud or a public cloud and everybody from Amazon to VMware to Google to Facebook and so on are just going for that talent. So how do you attract that talent, how do you keep them motivated, how do you keep them plugged in, I think that’s the biggest challenge in technology. It always has been, it’s actually even worse now.

From a technology point of view, what are the biggest challenges?

I think if we look at it right now, couple of things that is not quite happening is in the mobile industry. Enterprise mobility has not kept up with the mobility in consumer, it’s just night and day and if you look at the number of mobile applications you depend on for just your private work, there are thousands, at least 20 of them you use pretty regularly. On the enterprise side we are still using mainly for email and calendar. That’s what 99% of the people do.

So, I think enterprise mobility has not kept up. And two reasons I think are- the IT departments are just trying to buy solutions from vendors, they are not spending their time actually thinking creatively of how to add value. So they are generally shopping around to see what the big vendors have and they even sometimes implement the ecosystem or they buy all the software. But it does not mean that you create a big environment where you can actually use it to generate value. So, I think this is a big gap and I see elements of it getting caught up.

Even in a company like VMware, when I started about six quarters ago, the number of mobile applications available for general employees were not much, so generally people just used the email and calendar. So we had to challenge our team and now they have developed about 10 and they have road mapped to do 40 and they are really critical applications that can really improve productivity and people love it when you roll it out to them. But I think that has not taken off. I mean when I ask other companies what are those critical mobile apps they say we have an expense reporting system which is not really I think that they have developed, it’s pretty much they would have bought a company which has a mobile client. That is not thinking through, people are getting buried with email, almost everyone of the approvals for systems comes through some email and it gets lost in an email.

What is the kind of innovation you expect? Can you give me some examples?

Let me give you this example on the same topic. Typically a day in a manager’s life these days would look like- you have got to approve some expenses, you have to approve a headcount, you have to approve some purchase order requisitions, you have to approve some new vendor who is signing, some legal document, etc and it goes on and on. If you look 20 years back, the way you did approvals or 30 years ago when I did my business in Bangalore, my assistant or somebody in the office would give me a vanila folder with all the things I need to sign, in one place. So I could just take a pen and sign it. Believe it or not, what has happened now is while we have automated all of them. So I am going into the Concur Expense System on my mobile, download the client, put it on my computer and then I have to log in and approve for expense report. I download something called BrassRing on my computer again, log in to approve a headcount. I download a Workday client to go log in and approve my workday salary increase and then I go into a DocuSign, I mean it goes on and on, so it may take me a full half a day and people are chasing me saying all these approvals are in your queue, either I have to go through my email, try to approve them from my email or log on to these various systems.

So, some clever guys what they do is they tell their assistants to do it just because they can’t deal with this. So what we have done is we’ve looked through this problem as an IT team and my team developed in a very, very short time a universal approval application that you download this, all the approvals I have to do comes in one system, it is pushed to me on my mobile and it takes me two seconds to approve, it works with the restful APIs, Concur, Kupa and Ariba and DocuSign and everybody else has and you do all the approval from one end. It’s probably one of the most productive applications.

So, when I’m travelling to India, on my way from the airport I could approve million dollars worth of purchase orders or people’s requisitions and so on, so much easier, but we don’t have those kind of apps developed. So that’s one example and I have several like that, that we have developed and we have pipeline of 40 odd applications that people are going to just love.

Do you believe IT is not being challenged enough?

I think IT has – I mean I’m generalizing here, because I run up across lot of CIOs who are extremely innovative, but in general IT has still been stuck on back office systems, our jobs have been pretty much set on- let’s implement the ERP, let’s implement the new financial system, there is a new regulatory system that we have to do, there is a new revenue recognition system, here’s new sales system, sales automation system and then we finish all of them and by the time we finish it is time to start all over again saying there is a new HR system, new sales system and so on and so forth.
So we are implementing versions on our vendor’s calendar rather than saying- how can I move the business forward. So it is okay to have older version of software if it doesn’t really do anything. I mean you don’t have to update it just because the vendor says they have to update it. How does it move the two things? That is- are you cutting cost, are you increasing revenue, are you reducing friction for your employees.

So I think we have not challenged ourselves sufficiently to use those technologies. The second thing is, also I just generally feel like we’ve become too conservative, in the sense we wait for a long time to ascertain whether it’s a trend or not. For example, if there is a new software or product out, we wait till 80% of the people implement it before we even look at it. So somehow we become too skeptical in looking at new product introductions faster and being innovative, so we’re still doing it but we are waiting for everybody else to do it before we boldly go for it. Lot of the software sits on the shelf and are not implemented. So those are two places I’ll push pretty hard.

I just talked about the talent and the challenges and then we talked about what are the IT folks not doing and I think we’re not pushing innovation hard enough is what I was saying and what I mean by that is we get so buried in just the back office functions that we do. It’s almost like Y2K over and over.

What are the kind of innovations as a CIO you would like IT to do?

I mean the first two things I always talk about the CIO’s role is to kind of be like a surfer, because there are so many waves coming in IT and you have to be riding those waves. So some people just sit on the surf board, they don’t ride the wave, they wait for the next wave, the next wave, the next wave and some people just jump on the first wave they get and they crash out.

So I always believe like you have to ride the wave and then ride the next wave and the next wave and the next wave. We can’t look too far ahead and too far beyond. Now what’s happening in technology is, the waves are coming faster and faster and that’s what people are not able to handle. Previously you get one wave and then a year later you get another wave, now the waves are coming in three months and two months and so on. You see, I like it, lot of people like it, I want it to come even faster. So I think unless you like it and ride it, it gets stressful. So I tell people, if you don’t want to ride the wave you have to sit on the beach. You can enjoy watch somebody else playing it but you have to go ride it. So the two waves that are in front of you that we haven’t ridden well still is mobile and cloud. Everybody talks about the cloud and say that they have written a lot about it, but people are not taking advantage of it.

So people believe cloud and they just immediately go into Azure or Amazon. Okay, that’s fine, that’s a big trend. But your datacenters that people have are still not run the way those data centers are run and 80-90% of your compute will still be on your private cloud, so how do you really run a private cloud most efficiently. So one of the things I spend time with my CIOs is to talk about how VMware runs a private cloud and how we also put things in public cloud. But don’t forget that you still have to run this efficiently and how very, very few people can automate and run it. You have to give an Amazon like experience or Azure like experience for your internal users as well regardless of where the actual compute is and then you need to be able to hook up to the different clouds as they happen. So that’s still not completely exploited yet.

The second thing is the mobile- the wave has not started like I explained to you-but then when I talk to everybody and say what you have on mobile most people have not thought through that. You would like to have an app store for mobile- when there are 2 million applications for consumers, you should have at least 100 for enterprises, because not everybody would use all the application.

The approval application I talked about, you know you may not download it, it may not make sense to you, but you may download something we call People Search where you can find anybody, who he reports to, where does he sit, how can I get to his office etc. You may like that but I may not use that. So you need to have a cross-sectional application that majority of the people would like and use on a regular basis.

So mobile is not still exploited completely. The next few waves that are coming and I talked to people is the whole thing on Internet of Things. Even I looked at it a few years ago and I said this looks like a lot of buzz and hype and so on, but what is happening now is – all these things and gateways are getting connected to the internet.

So if the CIO and the IT department are not jumping into it early, your customers are going to hook up to it. So what I tell them is in mobile computers what happened is the IT department didn’t take control of it early, so people started bringing their own phones, just tried to get on the corporate network and then we had to figure out how to make it work and then we got AirWatch and other kind of tools. It was still a reactive play instead of proactively saying if you have a phone connected to my network, here are 50 applications you can use. That would have been an innovative IT. IoT is in a similar space where we are all saying- well let’s just go to a conference, let’s see what somebody else is talking about, let’s see what GE says, and let’s learn. I think it’s dangerous because now everything in the company, every factory is going to be hooked to the internet and the IT function is going to be bypassed if they are not. So I think that’s the next one I tell people to get involved, set the architecture, define the standards, pay attention, you can add tremendous value to the business. I think that is coming and as I look at it I also run facilities and buildings and so on.