Every business has the potential to be Uberized right now

Bask Iyer joined VMware in March 2015 and serves as the company’s senior vice president and chief information officer (CIO). Iyer leads VMware’s global information and technology organization, a group that manages critical technology systems supporting the company’s worldwide business operations.

A respected industry veteran, Iyer brings more than 25 years of experience in executing and driving change in traditional Fortune 100 manufacturing companies and Silicon Valley-based high technology firms. Prior to joining VMware, Iyer served as senior vice president and chief information officer at Juniper Networks, where he was responsible for the company’s technology and business operations, which included critical services around business transformation, global business services, IT and real estate, and workplace services.

In an exclusive interview to Dataquest, Iyer talks about the changing role of CIOs, their relationship with the CFO and CEO and being a CIO of a technology company. Excerpts. 

You are a CIO of a tech company what is the kind of subtle relationship you have with your larger community- like core industry CIOs? 

The first is credibility. I have not just been a technology CIO, I have been a regular industry CIO as well and hence I understand their pains and pangs. I consider the CIOs job a challenging one. With the constantly changing technology landscape, today the CIO has to be extremely tech savvy and on broader level CIOs need to forge excellent relationships with all the stakeholders- right from customers to partners to vendors. And the voice of another CIO is very important. CIOs would call me and they will ask me things about other companies et al, so it’s a delicate balance and we are a community exchanging knowledge, ideas et al and it does not really matter if you are a tech company CIO or core enterprise CIO. The bottom line is we run the IT organization.

Typically the Indian CIOs now face pressure from the CFO and CEO. How do you see a CIO's relationship with  CFO and CEO?

 The good and the bad about the IT function is that when we speak from a broader industry perspective, the whole CIO and their IT role have been created recently ( last 10 -15 years). It is not like a head of HR – who has been there since a company has been there, there has always been a financial person, so they have had a long time to develop. And also their roles are well defined. You know what a CFO does; you know what a HR person does. But if you look at CIOs- they have evolved in time from humble origins- like basement geeky guys to MIS/EDP managers to CIOs. Their roles are also not cut out in the formative years, like for instance when I started as head of IT, even if a PC doesn’t work, they will call me, if that network doesn’t work, they call me. Those days the CIOs donned the role of a troubleshooter. They have indeed come a long way.

But in time the role of the CIO amply expanded and they are still evolving. The interconnect the CIO has with the CEOs and CFO are growing by the day. But my point of view is, if I am a CEO running a company I want the CIO to be very strategic and to be my right hand person - because he or she is the biggest competitive weapon I have. So I think India has to go through a period where we demand and we define what we want, we need visionary leaderships to set their expectations from the CIOs. Every business has the potential to be Uberized right now. That’s how I define the enterprise digitization. I think we are going through a new wave where the visionary CEOs are working in close concert with the CIOs to usher in enterprise wide transformation.

If you look at IT decision making and compare and contrast US with India, are the Indian CIOs empowered to prescribe their choice of  technology to the management and they accept  it?   What is the trend here? 

I am going to generalize from what I have seen. And a lot of the companies where the CIOs report to a global organization by and large have limited scope in terms of choice of technologies, its more often dictated by the global organization he or she reports into. In this  case the CIO operating from here is the one who make that tech deployment happen  locally. But if you are a CIO based out here and have full decision autonomy and play a global role, then the  dynamics change and you are the key decision maker.

Let's look at other aspects. In VMware, how much of dog-fooding happens - from beta stage to the GTM? 

A lot. I call it 'drinking your own champagne', because you know a lot of people call it dog fooding even in VMware. So there are two ways to look at it, one is, I just don’t want to look at it as a quality control, so there is a quality control, but I don’t want the engineers to dump the quality control to IT. So somebody has to make good products, they have to test it, make sure that it is validated across multiple use cases and so on.

Our role comes as the first customers. We actually run it and check for key empirical parameters like how it scales, its functionality, its potential appeal in the market and the upgrade paths. Its not confined to these, we do a whole lot other stuff. And we run it several years before. But more importantly what we do is, we get feedback on the features we want on the next work release. We participate very heavily with the R&D and the things that we want. It is called concept validation. R&D folks have lots of concepts.

Then this thing about running our own, for example we run all of VMware on a private cloud. If I go and talk to somebody how to build a private cloud, I can actually come back and say that I run my entire VMware on my private cloud.

When VMware acquires a company, how does the integration happen? Does it pose a challenge in integrating a new asset?

There are several places where the CIOs can participate. First, when the decision is made on acquisition, the CIO has to participate in it. I mean I give input to the strategy team on whether we should go there or not. It is the management decision, but at least they will have an input from a customer stand point. I think that is the first point. The second, there is no point in buying a company that just adds value but we need to look at those synergies that make sense to my IT team.

And the third is the actual integration. Integration is done in two ways. There are some companies the integration was more like, come on board, you are getting into our email, and in 30 days you are done. The companies we integrate, we acquire, some of them have their own unique personalities, and you don’t want to kill them. So you need to be careful on how far you want to go on synergies.

As a CIO what will be your priorities for the next 10-12 months? Which of the areas that you think is going to help VMware and your customers?

I think mobile and it is very hugely untapped. Enterprise mobility is a huge area. Every CIO should look at this very seriously.