CIO Relishes 'Guinea Pig' Role ...

Computerworld - ... inside Microsoft because "I can realize value earlier." So says Ron Markezich, CIO for IT at Microsoft. But Markezich might easily be misconstrued as a senior executive on the vendor's quality assurance team. His staff is responsible for putting Microsoft technologies targeted for enterprise use into the company's production IT environment at their alpha stage, long before they're ready to ship. "I look at our IT organization as an extension of our product development team," Markezich says. Given his reliance on prerelease versions of products, you'd think his bosses would cut him some slack in delivering services to Microsoft's end users. Not so, he claims. "I don't feel like I get more slack," Markezich says, noting that his service-level requirements actually increased this year. That logic stems from the belief that early product adoption gives him a head start on improving system capacity, performance and reliability while keeping a lid on costs. Markezich cites his early deployment of Exchange Server 2003, which Microsoft began using well before the software's commercial release. He says he was able to eliminate 67 Exchange Server 2000 processing sites and consolidate the company's global e-mail system into seven sites running the newer software. That has helped Markezich cut $100 million from what he calls "sustainer spend," the fixed IT costs for supporting employees -- dropping the annual total to about $300 million. His next big project doesn't revolve around Microsoft's core software. He's beginning to upgrade the company's 802.11b Wi-Fi infrastructure, most likely to 802.11g technology. He calls the project "the world's largest wireless WAN deployment" and says it should be done by June. That doesn't mean he's refraining from putting Microsoft's alpha products through their paces, though. In fact, Markezich acknowledges that sometimes Microsoft IT is the bottleneck on the company's delivery of new products. "A lot of the times a Microsoft product slips its ship date is because we did not sign off on it," he says. Now you know who to blame.

Thomas Gruver of Microsoft