Google found its new chief information officer, Ben Fried, on Wall Street--and at least on paper, it looks like a good fit.
Google CIO Benjamin Fried
(Credit: Association for Computing Machinery)Even though Google is a Silicon Valley company thousands of miles away from the buttoned-down brokers of lower Manhattan, the two domains have more in common technologically and culturally than one might think.
Wall Street companies and Google have different objectives, but both have a similar modus operandi. They use lots of cutting-edge computer equipment, often with plenty of in-house customization, to get ahead of the competition.
Most companies buy off-the-shelf software, but Wall Street firms like to write their own. Indeed, one of the areas under Fried's purview at Morgan Stanley was managing source code. Google takes this custom engineering philosophy a step further, building its own hardware, too. That's an important cultural commonality.
"They have a very similar attitude: 'Dammit, we can do it better than anyone else,'" said Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice.
For Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and the like, top-notch computing can mean placing a stock trade order a smidgen faster than rivals, yielding a handsome profit for as long as the advantage can be maintained. For Google, it means an up-to-date search engine that can return results alongside targeted advertisements in less than a second.
Wall Street and Google also must make their technology work across a scale seldom seen, with thousands of servers working in tandem.
That means information technology budgets are high, technology turns over quickly, and IT executives have more power and responsibility than they do at the average company.
"It's very unlike Main Street or Rust Belt or retail, where everything is about cost. In finance, it's all about the service delivered," Eunice added. "We're not talking ERP and CRM--six months to begin looking at it and five years to put it in," he said, referring to the sluggish and expensive deployments of enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management computing systems.
Google and Wall Street are quintessential examples of what Sun Microsystems Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos calls redshift companies. Essentially, these are the companies that use technology as a competitive advantage, not a necessary and costly evil.
Another influential thinker in the domain is Nicholas Carr, whose 2003 Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter" riled up computing companies who saw things differently. The article posited that buying computing technology wasn't a good way to get ahead, because everybody else already had done so, too.
In the years since he published the article, though, many companies have decided that indeed some IT, at least, doesn't matter. Salesforce.com, for example, hosts CRM software on its own servers and sells its clients access to the systems. This "software as a service" approach is catching on, as Carr discussed in his 2005 sequel, "The End of Corporate Computing.
But Google isn't likely to outsource anything. Like Salesforce.com and Amazon with its pay-as-you-go Web services, Google's ambition is be a site where software as a service runs.
Its Google Apps service offers word processing, spreadsheets, calendars, and e-mail in an online form, and its new App Engine is now available as a general foundation where programmers can house their own Web-based applications, piggybacking on some Google technology.
In short, it looks like Google wants to expand the influence of its computing infrastructure. What better place to be a CIO?
Google has found its new chief information officer, CNET News.com has learned: Benjamin Fried, a programmer who rose through the ranks to run much of Morgan Stanley's computing infrastructure.
Google CIO Benjamin Fried
(Credit: Association for Computing Machinery)Fried, a managing director who led Morgan Stanley's Application Infrastructure group, will take the new post in May, Google spokesman Matt Furman confirmed Thursday.
According to an internal Morgan Stanley memo seen by News.com, Fried will leave Morgan Stanley at the end of the month "to pursue opportunities outside the firm."
The memo also indicated that Fried is no stranger to Google. While at Morgan Stanley, one of his projects was working on Google's initial public offering in 2004, the memo said.
Google's last CIO, Douglas Merrill, left earlier in April to become president of EMI's digital unit. Earlier this month, rumors surfaced that Fried would be Google's new CIO.
Running Google's computing infrastructure is a daunting challenge on which the company's success hinges. Google not only has thousands of servers housed in at least 36 data centers scattered around the globe, but also a build-it-yourself culture that means the company is responsible for maintaining much of its own technology.
Fried, who worked for Morgan Stanley computing operations for nearly 14 years, has experience in the area, though. According to the memo, he worked on Morgan Stanley's first Web site, its workstation software, and its intranet.
From the World Wide Web to high-end salami
Fried got in on the ground floor of the Web. According to his biography, while he was at Columbia University, he worked on the original World Wide Web software written by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
In his most recent work at Morgan Stanley, Fried ran a wide swath of essential technology operations that are part of the Application Infrastructure group. His purview included e-mail, grid computing, real-time market data, source code management for software projects, the Web site, instant messaging, and desktop software.
Before joining Morgan Stanley, he did some work for Heuristicrats Research that sounds right up Google's tech-savvy alley: he helped design what he calls the Decision-Theoretic Scheduler, technology to schedule jobs in a system that's got too much to do already. It's abstruse stuff, but it sounds like it would apply squarely to Google's computing challenges. NASA used it to schedule missions, he said.
Outside of his computing work, Fried's an Ultimate Frisbee fan with ailing knees and a partner in Fra' Mani Handcrafted Salumi, a Berkeley, Calif.-based maker of cured meats that was founded by chef Paul Bertolli.
Despite gloom and doom hitting the economy, the fear factor largely hasn't eroded IT budgets for this year, according to a Gartner CIO study to be released next week.
IT budgets worldwide are expected to grow 3.3 percent this year, and 62 percent of those surveyed by Gartner expect their budgets will remain unchanged despite the changing economic winds.
And surprisingly, 15 percent of the CIOs surveyed said they plan to increase their budgets this year, by 15 percent on average. Woohoo.
While all this may cause a sigh of relief among IT providers, the industry isn't totally out of the woods.
Of the 1,011 CIOs surveyed during a four-week period spanning mid-February through March, 23 percent said they planned to cut spending on average by 10 percent. And in the U.S., the growth rate for IT spending is slowing to 2.3 percent for the year, from a growth rate of 3.1 percent in the previous period.
"Overall, the majority of CIOs reported no change in their 2008 committed budgets. This indicates that IT budgets are not the 'target rich' environment for cost cutting they have been in the past. However, there is some softness, particularly in the U.S.," said Mark McDonald, research head for Gartner Executive Programs, in a statement.
Win some, lose some.
Forrester just released a report that should be required reading for enterprise software vendors who insist on inflicting the 20th century on their customers. According to Forrester, "software licensing and pricing continues to be marred by complexity, soaring maintenance costs, and a lack of flexibility and alignment with business goals."
In the French version of the synopsis, Forrester gives even more detail. For those of us who compete with these bloatware kings, this isn't news. But for enterprises who haven't been on a buying spree lately, you're in for a rude awakening:
... Read moreZiff Davis Media announced Thursday plans to sell its enterprise group for approximately $150 million in cash to a New York-based private equity and venture capital firm.
An affiliate of Insight Venture Partners of New York is snapping up Ziff's publications EWeek, Baseline and CIO magazines, according to Ziff's announcement.
But before jumping to the conclusion that CIO magazine has been sold, keep in mind that CIO is owned by rival IDG. The CIO magazine Ziff is selling is CIO Insight.
Ziff is also selling a number of online publications as part of the deal. These include EWeek.com, Web Buyers Guide, CIOInsight.com, Baseline, Microsoft Watch, Channel Insider and DeviceForge.com.
The sale of these online properties, ironically, comes as a number of brick-and-mortar print publications are searching for ways to grab an online presence, in order to chase after advertising dollars migrating online.
The deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter, also wraps in the company's worldwide events and database of 3.5 million users.
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