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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

June - 2012 - issue > CIO Insights

Moving to Cloud & Mobile is pertinent for Businesses

Walter Curd
Friday, June 1, 2012
Walter Curd
Walter Curd is the VP and CIO for Maxim Integrated Products. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Maxim Integrated Products (NASDAQ: MXIM) is a $2.5 billion in annual revenue that makes highly integrated analog and mixed-signal semiconductors. In his current position Curd has led a modernization effort of infrastructure and applications that has begun to produce substantial business benefits. Curd insures that Maxim is an early adopter of consumer technologies, cloud computing, and most recently enterprise social networking. Prior to joining Maxim, he built the Information Technology Services organization for Marvell Semiconductor to support their growth from $300M to over $3.0B during his tenure. He has also led the IT organizations for Fujitsu, Electroglas, and CyberIQ Systems.

Changing Technology Trends

The real overriding trend is the complexity that is increasing. The reason being that for 10 – 15 years excluding the dot com there were a clear set of enterprise IT vendors. We were equipped with the SAP or ERP; we had the Microsoft on the desktop CISCO on network.

Something that has fundamentally changed in the last 3 – 4 years is the whole conception piece. Consumers are becoming more IT savvy and consumer IT way surpassing enterprise IT. Big companies have big margins and the gap between the consumer offering and enterprise IT is expanding. With the growing amount of consumer offering we have several options in the major computing world. Such things are observant by the Silicon Valley. It has been different here and it has been in the rest of the country for the last three years. We had three booms going on in the same time, 'Cloud', 'global' and 'social'. From consumers stand point everything is cloud. Whereas from an enterprise stand point the rise of companies like 'Salesforce.com', 'Workday' that provide single purpose sort of cloud solutions. It not only provides you with an opportunity to do things faster but also at a lower cost. This really increased the complexity.

Earlier you would buy application from Oracle or SAP. But now we are in a much more fragmented situation— the reason being the solutions that are being provided by various cloud vendors today. These solutions are easy to implement as we are free from the technical complexities on the back end. Taking a look at the cloud standpoint at Maxim, we push a lot of things. We are Salesforce and Workday customers and our strategy is to avoid buying in-house software application unless there is no other way to do it. We focus on the innovation of infrastructure but more than that, we focus on application.


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