April 8, 2008 7:09 AM PDT
Google to get Morgan Stanley veteran as CIO?
A week ago Google lost its CIO, Doug Merrill, to EMI. Word on the street is that Google has already found a replacement, and it's Ben Fried, divisional CIO at Morgan Stanley.
How relevant is Mr. Fried's experience to Google? Consider his role:
A Managing Director in Morgan Stanley's Information Technology department, Ben Fried manages teams in New York, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong and is responsible for Morgan Stanley's Institutional Securities Web infrastructure and client connectivity. His purview includes numerous Internet sites and a global, multi-platform application-hosting environment running over 1,000 applications, services and portals.
Sounds like a bullseye to me. It will be interesting to see whether Fried will try to rein in the free-wheeling IT culture that Merrill espoused. I somehow doubt that he'll have much of a choice.
I imagine he'll have a lot of fun along the way. Google strikes me as a company that does IT right (even now opening up its data centers to outside developers).
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
