Ingram CIO: Technology Must Tackle Business Productivity

Mario Leone became Ingram Micro's CIO in January 2009, and CIO and executive vice president in June 2009, following decades as a senior technology executive in the industrial, automotive and chemical engineering industries. He's certain the end of the current recession, like others before it, will be remembered as a turning point for technological development because recessions, Leone says, have a way of breeding new ideas and becoming proving grounds for the technologies that will be standard in tomorrow's businesses.

For this recession, Leone says, the big trend is technology fit for business purpose. The days of new tech for new tech's sake, in other words, are over, and have given way to building technologies that innovate and make business more efficient.

Leone sat down with CRN Networking Editor Chad Berndtson earlier this month to talk about the state of technology innovation during the launch of Ingram Micro's Experience Center in Buffalo, N.Y. Excerpts of the conversation follow.

You've been a CIO through some pretty big upswings and downturns in the overall market. From where you sit, what does the picture look like right now?

I've been around the industry for quite a few years and I think that we're at one of those moments where the economy has stabilized somewhat, and what's interesting is a new generation of products and solutions coming through. I think back over the last 30 years, whenever there was a recession, there was also the beginnings of a technology change, and I think we're in that same moment now.

We went through a couple of very tough years. It's also been a period of time where a lot of innovation has continued, and we're coming out and seeing a lot of these products come out into the marketplace and become commercialized. It's a wonderful time: technology folks and business people are brought together to have what I'd call applied technology -- technology that has a clear business value. If you talk, for example, about telepresence, that's going to change completely the way we do business, not just because of the technology itself but the reality that you can bring people into live meetings in a forum we either couldn't do before, or we could do but at a high cost. Now it's an affordable model, and you see business application, such as eliminating SG&A (selling, general and administrative) expenses.

So what that means is that just to have the technology is one part of the equation -- you have to have the other side, too, where there is business value and you can see real costs coming out of your financial statement. Something like telepresence, it's a life balance, too. You know it sounds great to travel all over the place, but when you've done it so much, it gets a little old.

Flip over to the data center, and that's really exciting because in the past you had networking and server technologies that were almost separate, and what you're seeing now is the beginning of the integration of those technologies together in a way that changes the dynamics of how we can move things around in the data center, and the types of skills you need. It allows you to get into the sort of stateless computing where you can provision on demand under a much more variable model.

From a business standpoint, you go ahead and control your capital investments in these things -- you can vary your cost, and during tough economic periods, that's important. The outlay of capital in a time like this? It's very tough to predict what the next couple quarters will look like. But now you're variable; now you can spin up additional servers if you need them and change things. It's an impact in a positive way.

Next: When Efficiency Also Means Trimming Staff

You're also streamlining staff. As uncomfortable as that may be because it means fewer people and fewer silos, the tech departments are converging, too, no?

I've been through the automotive industry and the chemical industry, and I think we can't be afraid of the fact that productivity is a real thing. As much as we want to ignore it and not put it out there in sentence, the reality is that these choices need to be made. When you have things that move around, you're not always cutting for cutting's sake or just trimming real estate and people to do it. It's not necessarily negative; it creates opportunities.

Today, you can run a data center with 50 percent fewer people than you probably could 10 years ago, and the productivity is much higher in terms of utilization. Another reality is that other jobs are created. I don't think we're afforded the luxury of saying we can build new technologies and not look for any productivity gains. We tried that in the 80s. There was a lot of the technology introduced then and into the early 90s, but how much productivity really occurred? Not a lot.

Today, there's much more an association of technology with business results. If you look at most CIOs, like myself, we've been asked over the last decade to take an enormous amount of costs out of the business. We were able to grow while taking costs out as well. You can do both: you can optimize your costs and introduce new technology, and the end result of that is productivity. You can't be afraid of it. That's why any good technology today has to be addressing both parts of the equation.

What's telling you that people are ready for video? I mean, we've reached a point where like it or not the recession happened and video is something to take the place of a lot of the travel we're losing. But by and large, video still isn't at a point where most people see it as easy as touching a button and having it be as comfortable and second nature as a phone call. How do you know they're ready?

Much of the demand, if you will, in the business arena is coming from the consumer arena. Employees can go home and Skype with their kids who live around the world and do all these things, and then they go back to work an the expectation is why can't they do it there as well?

Years ago, the simple answer was that there wasn't enough bandwidth, or it was just too costly to put in video centers. But guess what, the technology is now pretty pervasive and the cost of running that technology for many companies is there, especially if you put a foundation around networks properly. You build those networks where you can run data, voice and video, and that's ripe to start a new curve where you're going to see the demand coming.

The consumer drive is an exciting thing, and it's not something that's been a part of the fabric of business meetings before. Businesses do simple conference calls and things of that nature, but soon we'll be at a brilliant new generation where video will be a standard part of the work day.

Next: Consumerization Is Undeniable

To stay on the consumerization point for a second, you have Skype, iPad, all these pervasive consumer-led technologies, and at the same time, all but the most conservative businesses see the business value in enabling things like social networking and YouTube. For CIOs, is it still security that's holding up fuller adoption of these things?

If you look back to the early 90s when the Internet was introduced to many corporations, Internet access was given to executives who couldn't even turn on their PCs, and the people who actually needed it, like research chemists and engineers, were prohibited from using it because the issue was security. I think security becomes an excuse. There's always going to be a need to understand the information going in and out of a corporation, but that can't be a barrier to doing what's right in terms of accelerating integration of the devices that make you more productive.

If you go back 10 years, a CIO would say, I want exactly the same device used everywhere in the world, and the same brand, and I'll hang in the public square any employee that uses something different. That's come full circle today. Most of us go home and we're using a plethora of different devices, whether iPad or whatever. Technology is catching up to a point where we can go ahead and integrate dissimilar devices, bring them through our firewall in an intelligent way and still have people working in a secure way. I don't think the security concern is overblown, but security shouldn't be used as a a barrier to new technology.

As the CIO of Ingram Micro, you've had to make no doubt painful changes like everyone else. Does that continue? What is your biggest challenge right now?

We're no different from many companies and that we went through the difficult moments of restructuring, consolidation and rationalization. You have to go ahead and deal with a lot of organizational and people issues. Is that gone forever? Answer is no, and in the competitive world you live in, there's always change that's going to occur. It's unacceptable to say that the cuts stop here because they don't. You have to look -- every CIO has to look -- at how to rationalize your teams, and rationalize the hardware and software you have.

I'm pretty bullish on what we have going forward and I think we're in a moment where you can have innovation and productivity, and savings, at the same time.