Key Performance Indicators

You tried a little junior college before deciding to skip higher education and go to work. Do you have any formal training in computer science?

I did take a course in COBOL, which was extremely useful, mainly because I saw that not everybody could do something that came pretty naturally to me. I discovered that everybody is good at something. You just have to figure out what it is.
You started out as a computer operator, at 18, at Computer Sciences Corp.

I got in trouble real bad. Because I could sit there and just operate the thing, I started logging on and trying to snoop around. But instead of being fired, I got promoted and I got a wonderful opportunity to work in another division, which was working on something they called DNS but was actually the very early stages of client server technology. I was developing database applications. I was exposed to a variety of customers.
Like who?

St. Jude's Children's Hospital came to us and said we'd like to use your computer and could you help us build an application that would help us keep track of all of our donors. I was behind the scenes developing this application according to spec. When it came time to turn it over, I was brought in and went to train people on it. Bless their hearts, there are these two little old ladies who were afraid of the computer.

I always hark back to that. Here I was behind the scenes having a blast designing this database, thinking about how to make it more efficient and all this other stuff, but I realized none of that made any sense to these ladies and they didn't care. In my career I have seen the habitual problem that IT has of not understanding the business value, and very early on in my career I had an opportunity to see that problem.
What was your worst job?

I was working at a major financial institution with a 700-person IT shop. You got lost. It was tough to accomplish anything. It was around that time I realized I really am a doer. I can get bored. I remember the day when I came in and cracked open a newspaper like everybody else did and ended up reading it cover to cover I said, 'I can't do this. This isn't me.'
How did you get into the entertainment business?

I had left CSC and was working at the financial institution and various other things and came back to Computer Sciences. Then one day I got approached by a headhunter about a job at MGM United Artists. I started off as a manager over the financial systems and became a director of applications and development. When I took that, it rejuvenated me about what I was doing.
Is there any entertainment experience in your background?

In junior college, I worked in theater arts behind the scenes. I did publicity, lights, sound, stage managing. I am a musician. I have a studio in my own house. I have a Christian rock band. We play in boy's prisons. We even played a Christian biker festival.
Getting back to your career, what's the best career advice you've gotten?

Don't argue with a fool because somebody walking into the middle of the conversation won't be able to tell you apart. IT is a strange business. People, for example, don't call you up and thank you when however many thousands of users are on your network are able to log in today successfully. They only call you when they can't.
So the enabler rarely gets to bask in the success.

We become the go-to source, and that has a good and a bad side to it. They're always running to us and complaining, but I started to realize that they're running to us because we are the geeks, or whatever you want to call us, within the organization that people are looking to and trust will be able to solve their problems. Inherent in that is the thank you.
Tell me about a good CIO decision you've made recently.

When our data warehouse went live, the first people that were going to receive the reports were our store personnel, not the executives. The week that store system went live, our store managers ran with that ball. We have graphs that show all the key performance indicators in each store. And the store managers are excited. If that system has a minor hiccup we hear about it immediately. They're out there tracking the horse race [sales] every day.
Can one store see what the other stores do?

I've worked in other environments where they are so protective of data. But in our case, we let any store see what the other store's performance is, down to department, down to a SKU, down to a 15-minute increment.
How do you do data management?

We use the Microsoft SQL Server for our data warehouse. I brought together a user team to go out and evaluate business intelligence technologies and ultimately pick. We came down to a bake-off between Hyperion Essbase [TK] and Microsoft's SQL Server. Behind the scenes I had been doing my homework and realized the way SQL Server was priced and the tools that came with it blew others away. One day the team asked me what I was voting for and I refused to answer them. They laughed, and said, 'We knew you would do that.' They made the choice.
So music is an avocation. What's your favorite guilty pleasure?

Golf.
Your handicap?

My entire game. But I play anyway.
What technology do you wish you lived without?

I wish I did live without mobile e-mail.
Are you worried about BlackBerry service being shut down?

I chose not to go with BlackBerry as a standard for our organization. We're using the various Windows Mobile-based or Palm devices. We ourselves at Virgin certainly have been approached about patent infringement, which we've tended to walk away from it pretty unscathed. But I understand the right of the guy who truly created the technology to come back and ask for his just due. It would seem foolish to me that would cause the service to come to a halt.
Robert Fort was in kindergarten when his mother, an applications developer, started taking him to work to help sort punch cards. At 8, he dressed up as a computer for Halloween. After graduating high school a year early, he skipped college and took a job at Computer Sciences Corp. Self-taught and self-assured, the 46-year-old Californian got his big break when he went to work at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. Now, as director of IT at Los-Angeles based Virgin Entertainment Group Inc., the North American subsidiary for the U.K. conglomerate, Fort keeps IT rocking at the $200 million company, recently bringing the sales data for every store online to managers throughout the 17-store Megastore chain. We spoke by phone about his vocation and avocations.

How do you pick a channel partner?

We have very specific guidelines that we follow when selecting channel partners. Those guidelines typically revolve around how quickly they can deliver, the breadth of their offering and pricing.
What do you buy and from whom?

Because of the big differential between what we spend on storage versus the rest of our IT needs, we typically look to vendors that handle the largest breadth of gear as possible. For EMC gear, for example, we work very closely with Dell. EMC has one of the largest networks of resellers and VAR [value added reseller] partners out there but we have found that we still get better service from a firm like Dell because of the fact that we buy so much other nonstorage-related equipment, servers, etc.

For smaller purchases or purchases we need in a faster delivery window, we work with a variety of local and national VARs and in many cases buy direct. In the case of software, we will, whenever possible, buy direct if the firm offers direct download. Even when a VAR can offer better pricing, the convenience of a direct download or automatic license purchase is far more important.
In your opinion, what are the advantages of working with a channel partner?

As an organization, we find that we need to be able to have established relationships with a variety of vendors and resellers to meet all of our needs. This is especially true when we are on a tight delivery timetable. A local reseller may charge a premium versus a larger national reseller or the vendor themselves, but they are able to add value and justify that price with a quicker turnaround.

The second key issue is that when we work with the larger resellers, we are able to get a lot better service because of our larger purchase volume. For example, we recently purchased an entry-level EMC SAN for a specific project, and had the scope of our project change overnight. We needed a SAN that could scale much larger and had to go with a higher end model that would scale further. EMC has a policy that once a PO [purchase order] is signed, they will not take a unit back unless it is due to a technical problem. Because of our relationship with Dell, they were more than willing to work with us, and did so in as painless a way as possible. If I was working direct or with a VAR that only handled storage or that I did not have the same dollar volume with, I am not confident we would have had the same experience.

Third, in theory, channel partners can introduce us to new products that we were otherwise unaware of, but in practice that is pretty rare in the current business climate.
What are the downsides to working with resellers?

This depends largely on the specific reseller and the way in which the manufacturer themselves has setup the reseller program. We have seen some nightmare scenarios when resellers are responsible for first tier support or sales engineering and the resellers are not equipped with the necessary technical resources to meet our needs. This is especially true when the reseller does not have the right number of specific subject matter experts and tries to utilize more generalists.

We also have a hard time with resellers that do not stock product. In the current climate, we typically make final purchasing decisions a week or two before we need the product installed in our data center. In some cases, due to project scope changes or emergency capacity upgrades, we need to be able to have a product the next day. Most resellers today, and for that matter, many vendors themselves, are not prepared to meet that kind of delivery timetable. For organizations with static needs or even static rates of change, that may be fine, but for a rapidly growing Internet-centric business it causes a lot of problems. To resolve this issue, we typically have three or four key resellers that can source any one product we use, so with a little legwork we are able to meet our timetable.
Are channel partners really independent?

Absolutely not. In my experience, channel partners are sales organizations and we treat them as such. We have had countless interactions with technology resellers that pitch either the product they have the highest margin on, or a product they need to move for internal purposes. We address this by doing as much homework as possible ahead of time and then utilize their subject-matter experts for specific implementation or integration questions.
Do you think you can get a better price working with a channel partner versus dealing with vendors directly?

My experience with pricing has been that it is directly related to the size of the manufacturer. We find that vendors with a large, diverse, mature product line, like EMC or Sun, offer their best pricing through the channel. Newer players or vendors rolling out a new product and looking for early adopters will inevitably offer better pricing and terms directly, than through their partners. With the competitive VAR landscape, there are fewer firms willing to distribute products on a loss-leader basis, but that still remains a vital strategy for vendors attempting to push a new product into the market place. Like any savvy buyer, we try to exert our pricing pressure and take advantage of such situations.
Buying storage gear from the channel needn't be as dicey as you might imagine as long as you know what to look out for. Aaron D. Sawchuk, co-founder and chief technology officer of managed services provider ColoSpace Inc., in Rockland, Mass., talked with SearchStorage.com about his experiences buying from the channel and some of the advantages this has brought him in dealing with key suppliers.

This is such a unique business. Where do you get the software?

The software was largely developed in-house, largely based on open source packages. We've had the luxury of being able to develop software for a business that was growing organically. That means we were able to build a prototype system. We weren't sure exactly what we wanted but had a reasonable idea. We threw together something very quick. It took us a few months.
Then what?

I think it was at about 1,000 members that we said alright -- no significant improvements will be made to the existing system. We're going to spend the next six months putting a solid foundation in place. We knew we wanted to support a large number of cities. We wanted to support thousands of vehicles, though at the time we probably had 40 cars. And what's going to happen when we have 100,000 customers and are running 24/7? We stepped back and said 'OK, what do we need to do to build something that can scale?'

Again, it was the luxury of organic growth. We had 1,000 members, and we could see could see we'd have 2,000 members in six or seven months. We had the luxury of stepping back and to spend a lot of time working on the underlying database. That was maybe six months. Then one Sunday night we switched over to the new system.
What did the new system have that the prototype didn't?

It had Oracle as the back end. It had an architecture that had a reasonable set of middleware -- where we had separation of business and data. We had a much more secure system. We had factored into that serious scalability, not just in terms of more transactions and more data -- but also from the user interface side, especially on the back office.
How did this idea get started?

We were inspired by European versions of this. Little mom-and-pop operations in Europe with quaint European ways of doing things -- 20 cars and lock boxes and little log slips you'd fill out. We looked at that and said, 'Well maybe that works because you can trust your small population of 200 or 300 people that might be using this small fleet of cars.' But we wanted to come at it with the big American approach that would allow us to go out and raise money -- because you could build a substantial business off of this.
Convenience being the key?

The reservation system had to be really easy to use. Access to the car had to be brain-dead simple, reliable and secure.

So that laid out the constraints on the system we had to build. We had to put wireless things in the cars because the cars had to be scattered all over the place. They needed the wireless component because that was the only way we could figure out how to build a secure system. How can you possibly keep track of how far people are driving if it's not automatically recorded?
Were there any early missteps?

In the early system we put out, we hadn't finished all the development of the wireless stuff, so people would go to cars and assume that everything was working like magic. But, in fact, if they had gone to any car, at any time of day, they would have been allowed access. But nobody knew that. Again, it was starting out very small, and there weren't any bad apples, so it was OK.
How are Zipcar's online reservation features unique?

It's a location-sensitive system. That is, when you go to reserve a car, the system knows where you live; it knows where you work; it knows the places you visit; where your cousin's house is, where the gym is -- all the locations you've told it about. Because of that, it knows what cars are near those locations. You tell it, 'I want to book a car tomorrow afternoon near my house.' And it will tell you, 'OK, these cars are available at the times near your house.'

It is scalable, because as we add a location -- and we're constantly doing that -- or deleting a location, it happens automatically. So we don't have to constantly tell people, 'By the way, there's a new location.' Because for people to remember all the locations, that's just crazy. But it's done in a subtle way. Every person who comes in to reserve a car gets a slightly different interface.
A key to automation is reducing human transactions. What's an example of how you've done that?

Lost and Found. People are always leaving things in the cars, cell phones, BlackBerrys, gloves, their Prada sunglasses. And people are always finding that stuff. We used to get lots of calls for that. I lost my cell phone! I found a cell phone! What the heck, we're getting lots of lost-and-found calls! This is starting to cost us real money, and what the heck are we supposed to do? So we had a policy -- if you find something, leave it in the glove box.

Then we put in place a big, simple, lost-and-found system for members to report the items online. You can report an item lost or found only in one of the cars you've used in the past 30 days. You go to the Lost and Found, and the only cars you can see -- in terms of what you want to report -- are the cars you've used.
Then it's like a match?

If you've found something, you can report it found. If you've lost something you can look at what's been reported found in the cars you've used. And that takes us out of the loop. The member then has to book a car for the hour. Booking it is the only way you can guarantee the car will be there. The number of calls went down to next to nothing.
What about things like snow removal or street cleaning? Does that make your job tougher?

We don't put cars on streets that are going to be hit by street sweeping, because operationally you'd be sending out the flying monkeys to move the cars. You've got to simplify.

Now, as the business evolves, the system changes. In Boston, we recently had a partnership with IKEA where we wrapped a half-dozen cars with IKEA advertising. That allows us to offer the cars to members for a discount. We wanted those cars used mostly for short trips, and so did IKEA, so we said, OK, the pricing will only have the discounted hourly rate -- and not the daily rate. It's a good deal.

What did it mean for IT?

We had to put into the system enough messaging up front to prevent two things: One, when the members got their billing they weren't really disappointed, because they booked it for 48 hours and ended up paying an hourly rate -- and two, that when they got to the car they didn't say, 'What the hell is this? This is not a Zipcar.' We took photos of the individual cars. We made sure that you could see on your reservation what you were going to get and we put in one intermediate step telling customers to be careful, that car can only be rented for an hourly rate.

It was a complete success. I don't think there has been a single complaint.
Roy Russell is vice president and No. 1 IT guy at Zipcar, a Cambridge, Mass.-based short-term rental car company that is six years old and profitable with annual revenues of $15 million. Talk about managing traffic. Russell has to make sure 50,000 registered members can share 900 cars in 28 cities across the country using wireless access cards. Today's technology provides Zipcar's competitive edge. Here Russell talks about the early Zipcar days, as well as his new lost-and-found service.

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