CIO50: We Want Cloud, Storage, Network Security

What CIOs Are Buying

Cloud computing, network security and storage are some of the technologies that end users are implementing now that the economy has recovered some and IT budgets have loosened, according to CIOs at Everything Channel’s VAR500/CIO50 conference held June 8 in New York. Here’s a closer look at what some of them had to say.

Sid Soman

Global Network Manager
United Nations


’There’s a lot going on in the United Nations. We are becoming one single entity and we are integrating different technologies to become a single entity for 192 countries. We just implemented Windows 2008 [Server] R2 . The plan is to have more than 140 countries on that and we have about 20 now. The United Nations headquarters is being renovated after 52 years and we moving to a whole new data center. We have virtualized almost all our servers. We started about two months ago.’

Paul McLaughlin

CIO
Office of the State Auditor, Massachusetts


’We’re bringing in storage and ... network security. We’ve outgrown our capacity and we have some big projects on the drawing board. We’ve talked with IBM and Dell [for storage]. For network security, we’ve talked with many companies. We talked with Datacomm [here at VAR500/CIO50]. At [the Midsize Enterprise Summit conference] in Boca Raton, we talked with Tri-Geo Network Security and Compellent. Also, we’re looking at business intelligence, IBM, Information Builders. We’re looking to extract and analyze more data beyond the capabilities of what we have now.’

Andrew Madejczyk

Vice President of Global Tech Operations
Sterling Infosystems


’We’re probably going to do a lot of networking, We’re adding server products and storage. We need the networking because we’re expanding our facility in Mumbai and the [additional] server and storage will be based in the United States to support India. We’re working with Cisco [Systems], Hewlett-Packard and 3PAR.’

Nick Garbidakis

CIO/CTO
American Bible Society


’We just bought some new HP storage and we’re actually looking at switching a lot of [other hardware and software] from Tier 1 to Tier 2 vendors. We’re scaling back to less expensive solutions because of our budget. It’s down 10 percent to 20 percent. But our priorities are virtualization, cloud, outsourcing.’

Derek Scarbrough

CIO
Institute of Museum and Library Services


’We’re looking at cloud services. We’re just starting to look but we think it’s necessary. We’re doing some data center consolidation and on the security side we’re looking to provide 24x7 monitoring. That’s why we’re here, the VARs are here. With the [Obama] administration, we have some objectives such as sustainability. We’re looking to go green and facilitate those [solutions]. For the cloud, there are so many new vendors and we’re waiting to see what vendors get on the GSA Schedule and what their scope of offerings is.’

William Choi

Director of IT
Cahill Gordon Reindel


’We’re doing Exchange 2010, Citrix XenApp, version 5 or 6 depending on where we go. Security is a big, big concern. We’re waiting for our financial clients to provide us guidelines there. We have Exchange 2003, so it’s been a while. We skipped the last one but we’re ready now. Same thing with Citrix, we’re on an older version and we’re looking to bring it up to date.’

Dovid Kashnow

Director of Information Technology
Imperial Distributors


’We’re looking at virtualization. That’s a big thing and network storage for our central repositiory. We’re just starting to look around now [at different vendors].’

Dick Malaise

Vice President and CIO
National Automotive Dealers Association


’We’re looking at virtualization and disaster recovery with real-time data replication. On the apps side, we’re looking at data warehousing. We have a lot of data, a huge database and we want to come up with some new solutions for customers.’

Ellen Christy

Director of Information Technology
Harbourvest Partners


’We’ve heavily invested in BI and we’re developing products for that. We’re going with MicroStrategy for BI. Microsoft is on the backend and we used Accenture services to get through it all. So far so good. Accenture just exited and we expect to have a couple dashboards to use in the next three months.’