10/15/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
If you have sat on a flight or a train recently, and a neighbor pulled out their mobile phone to play a game, often the game of choice is Candy Crush, it seems. At its peak, the game boasted roughly 100 million users. Though the company has had other successes with new games, last week, it introduced Candy Crush Friends Saga as an enhanced version of the mega-hit.
The company behind Candy Crush is King. I recently caught up with King’ s CEO Riccardo Zacconi to discuss the new launch.
(To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: Congratulations on the launch of the new Candy Crush Friends Saga. What is different in this version of the game from prior versions?
Riccardo Zacconi: We have made the game more beautiful with incredible 3D graphics. We have taken the best parts of the Candy Crush franchise games and brought them to the next level with Candy Crush Friends Saga. For the first time in the Candy Crush franchise, we brought the characters to life, giving them personality and background stories, that users will grow to know and love. The characters help you in the game by strategically throwing boosters into the game board to help beat blockers and allow you to level‐up more quickly, creating an authentic connection to the player.
Players can also unlock and collect new characters and use them as they advance in the game while also customizing their outfits. For the first time ever, the game taps into cultural moments with seasonal game updates. For example, a Dracula costume for one of the lead characters, Tiffi, is currently available for Halloween. A more rewarding game experience than ever, Candy Crush Friends Saga is filled with joy and constant sweet surprises.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes.
10/08/2018
Kimberly Johnson joined Fannie Mae in 2006. As such, she was with the company when it went through its most trying time in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. She was part of the team that led the company back from the brink in roles of increasing responsibility from Vice President of Capital Markets to Senior Vice President of the company’s Multifamily business unit to Chief Credit Officer to Chief Risk Officer.
In March of this year, she ascended to the role of Chief Operating Officer of Fannie Mae in March of this year. In that role, she is responsible for leading technology, data, enterprise models, operations, the enterprise program management office, and resiliency. Her varied and diverse experiences have aided her rise, and now that she has such a broad set of responsibilities, she has a broad ability to impact innovation within the company. She describes her journey and the path to innovation in this interview.
(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please click this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: Could you talk about your role as the Chief Operating Officer of Fannie Mae and the responsibilities the position entails?
Kimberly Johnson: The COO role that Tim Mayopoulos put together for me includes an interesting combination of responsibilities, such as overseeing Fannie Mae’s technology, operations, innovation, data, and strategic execution. This mix serves as a nice way to string together the full array of the functionality that we need to enable the business.
High: Was there a predecessor with this same job description, or were these a set of responsibilities that was brought together for the first time in the role created for you?
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
10/02/2018
BNY Mellon has named Sabet Elias as the company’s new Chief Technology Officer. He will report to the company’s chief information officer Bridget Engle, and he will serve on the firm’s Technology Executive Committee. Elias will be based in New York.
Engle noted, “Sabet is a talented technologist and brings to the bank a solid track record of building platforms. As we continue to shape our global technology agenda and improve resiliency, we need to add leadership talent with deep experience in technology to take us to the next level. Sabet has years of experience in financial services, plus deep management and technical expertise to help us navigate the future.”
10/01/2018
Steve Randich has been a CIO many times over at organizations like the Chicago Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ, and with Citibank prior to taking on his current post as CIO of Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc., better known as FINRA, which is a non-governmental organization that regulates brokerage firms and exchange markets. When asked about the evolution of the CIO role, he indicates that he has not seen much evolution, but that may be because he was a strategic leader, driving innovation from the CIO post long before others were presumptuous enough to think to do so.
At FINRA, Randich’s innovations center around leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to better surveil markets and broker-dealers. He also has led one of the most dramatic implementations of the public cloud. So extensive is the implementation that Amazon Web Services considers FINRA a best case example of the use of its technology. Randich has become an evangelist of the public cloud, citing it as the single technology across his career that actually gets cheaper as you use it more.
In this interview, he offers insights into all of the above and more.
(To listen to a podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future articles like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: Could you give a rundown of FINRA’s operation and your role as the Chief Information Officer?
Steve Randich: FINRA goes back to 1937 when it was known as the National Association of Security Dealers. After going through some mergers, other regulatory functions, and stock exchanges, the company became known as FINRA ten years ago. FINRA, which employs roughly 3,500 people, focuses on protecting investors by surveilling both the markets and the broker-dealer activities. As CIO, I run a 1,100-person organization, which focuses on building surveillance systems that assist our staff in examining firms and regulating the markets.
High: How are the new weapons in the IT arsenal implemented into FINRA’s strategy?
Randich: FINRA processes enormous amounts of data as the company handles upwards of fifty billion transactions on a daily basis, including all of the quotes, orders, and trades collectively across the equity markets in the United States. Additionally, the company looks at the historical data to identify trends over time, which exposes market manipulation, insider trading, and fraud in the markets. Several years ago, FINRA decided to use open-source, big data technologies on public cloud platforms to handle the large amounts of data efficiently and with scale. Today, those efforts are largely completed, and we are now moving into machine learning and advanced analytics. This will enable machines to do more of the surveillance, which allows our surveillance analysts to avoid the work that is better suited for the machines.
9/24/2018
Bill Ritter was the 41st Governor of Colorado, serving in office from 2007 until 2011. One of the areas that he emphasized in office was progressive energy policy. Since leaving office, he has continued to work in energy. The first way in which he has done so has been through the Center for the New Energy Economy, which he started in 2011 at Colorado State University. The mission of the organization is to advise state governments on energy transition, particularly away from coal.
Second, Ritter joined Blackhorn Ventures as a strategy partner. His three areas of emphasis there are on the built environment, the energy sector, and the transportation sector.
In this interview, Ritter discusses his time in office, his work since leaving office, and the path ahead, as he sees it.
(To listen to a podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future interviews like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: You were the 41st Governor of Colorado, serving from 2007 to 2011. One of the areas of passion throughout your life and as your time as Governor has been the new energy economy. Could you talk about this and how you see it developing?
Bill Ritter: As Governor, my team and I focused on our ability to utilize Colorado’s energy resources in a more environmentally favorable fashion than we had in the past. It was critical that while we worked towards this goal, we did so in a way that developed Colorado’s economy equitably, and we did not want to harm the utility customers. To make this transition, we focused on the four E’s: energy, environment, economy, and equity for customers. To achieve our goal, I signed 57 bills into law that transformed what had been a traditional fossil fuel economy into one that was focused on growing renewables, transitioning from coal to natural gas, and energy efficiency, which targeted energy conservation.
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes.
84 percent of sales leaders say they don’t believe they have the sales talent they need to succeed in the future. Why is that? Moreover, what can companies and their sales leaders do about it? I had a chance to speak with Byron Matthews, the Chief Executive Officer of the sales training, consulting, technology and research company Miller Heiman Group about approaches to use to improve sales.
(To read future stories like this one, follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: How has sales changed in the digital age?
Byron Matthews: The reason that sales has changed is that buyers have changed. Buyers have access to more information than ever before; buyers aren’t necessarily better informed, but they’re more informed. What we know for sure, what Miller Heiman’s research has shown, is that buyers are engaging sellers further along in the sales process, and only 23 percent of buyers are looking to sellers as a primary source of information.
Buyers are getting better at buying faster than sellers are getting better at selling.
Years ago, it was enough for a seller to meet with a potential buyer and ask great questions, to get a sense of the buyer’s needs, then come back and present them with a solution. In the digital age, that won’t cut it; you’ll just be wasting the buyer’s time. It is no longer just about providing information to a buyer, it’s about inspiring the buyer. In today’s selling environment, you need to provide a buyer with perspective on something they haven’t processed or thought about.
What inspires buyers are data-backed insights that make them think differently. Once buyers start thinking differently, they’ll start listening and looking to you for information. In a word, selling has become more sophisticated; sellers need to draw on their IQ, their data-backed knowledge, just as much as their EQ, their relationship-building skills.
9/19/2018
On September 13 at Lenovo’s Transform 2.0 conference in New York, Lenovo, a technology leader in intelligent transformation, and NetApp, a hybrid cloud and data company, announced a global multi-faceted, partnership to bring innovative technology and a simplified experience to help customers modernize IT and accelerate their digital transformation. As innovation leaders in high-performance computing and flash storage solutions, Lenovo and NetApp are uniquely positioned to bring leading technology and scale to enable customers worldwide to modernize their IT architectures from the edge to the core network to the cloud.
The two companies are co-developing the largest range of new Lenovo-branded storage products that combine NetApp’s all-flash data management solutions with Lenovo’s ThinkSystem infrastructure. These new products will utilize core software technology from NetApp and will be manufactured by Lenovo, leveraging Lenovo’s supply chain
Additionally, Lenovo and NetApp announced a new joint venture company in China to deliver storage products and data management solutions localized and tailored to meet China’s specialized requirements and distinct cloud ecosystem. The new venture is expected to be operational by spring 2019, pending local approvals.
Just prior to the announcement, I sat down with Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing and NetApp CEO George Kurian. Yang said, “Customers want a total solution. They want to reduce their vendor footprint where they can. This union brings together the capabilities of complementary players.”
9/17/2018
Seasoned technology executive Stephen Gold has joined Hudson’s Bay Company as the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Digital Operations Officer. In that role, he is responsible for leading the technology and digital strategy for the company, with a focus on aligning the end-to-end customer experience through data and digital innovation across the enterprise and HBC’s brands in North America. With his appointment to this role, HBC is aligning its digital operations and technical teams under a single Center of Excellence.
HBC CEO Helena Foulkes noted, “Steve is a seasoned technology and digital leader, who has a deep understanding of the retail market and has a proven track record of delivering large-scale technology initiatives that positively impact business outcomes. Steve is attuned to the customer-centric approach we are driving across all our business touchpoints, and his ability to blend technical complexities with consumer-friendly solutions furthers HBC’s commitment to seamless experiences for our customers.”
Blackstone Chief Technology Officer Bill Murphy has been a CTO multiple times, but he personifies the diversity of the role. At Capital IQ, he was a co-founder and CTO, where his responsibilities included overseeing all product design, development, infrastructure, and technology support and was involved with all operations of the business. That entrepreneurial experience has served him well now that he works with so many businesses across the Blackstone portfolio, on top of running the technology portfolio within the company. He brings a consultants mindset, as well, having spent the early part of his career with Sapient.
Murphy believes that his role today is to embrace and dream ahead of the broader business with technology, to assemble a team to enable innovation, and to develop and integrate technologies that are, to the greatest extent possible, future proof.
He covers all of the above and more in this conversation.
(To listen to a podcast version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future stories like this one, please follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: Could you describe your current purview as the Chief Technology Officer of Blackstone?
Bill Murphy: Blackstone is an Alternative Asset Manager with over $400 billion in assets under management [AUM] for pension funds and other types of institutional investors across different segments. We invest in a variety of areas, such as private equity where we buy companies, and real estate where we buy buildings. We also invest in a hedge fund called GSO Capital Partners, which manages corporate credit and other types of debt instruments.
I had an interesting migration coming over from Capital IQ, where I was part of the founding team. At Capital IQ, I was responsible for building a product for our customer base, which was made up of hundreds of thousands of financial services employees. We were focused on meeting one need exceptionally well, and while over time we built many use cases, they were inwardly focused. On the flip side, Blackstone must meet the needs of our 2,300 employees, which is a relatively small number given the impact that we have across all of our different businesses. Unlike at Capital IQ where we investigated a few deep use cases, Blackstone is focused on a coordination of many small use cases across an extremely broad spectrum of what we are trying to accomplish as a business. Furthermore, I lead a strategic venture effort that works with our vendors by occasionally investing money off Blackstone’s balance sheet, which has been successful on multiple occasions. Blackstone’s belief is that the better we understand the business, the more likely we are to make the right types of investments in small companies. By doing so, we are able to help them shepherd through such that not only Blackstone gets a great product, but the market does as well. Lastly, across our portfolio, I advise and help create a community across many companies, and we have some specific disciplines of that in our portfolio operations group. We are continually tweaking this to try to make it better because the needs of technology are rapidly evolving. It gives an interesting perspective, and there is never a dull moment with variety.
9/12/2018
Global interconnection and data center company, Equinix, Inc. today announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Charles Meyers to the position of President and Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. Meyers will also join Equinix’s Board of Directors. He succeeds Peter Van Camp, who has served as interim CEO since January 2018. Van Camp will resume his role as Executive Chairman of the Equinix Board of Directors.
Regarding Meyers’ new role, Van Camp noted, “Charles is an outstanding leader who has been a major contributor to Equinix’s success over the past eight years, playing critical roles in the company as we have quadrupled in size, growing from $1.2 billion in revenue to the $5 billion plus we expect to generate this year. Charles brings that rare combination of a world-class operator combined with a passion and drive for strategic innovation. These characteristics, and his proven track record of delivering value for our customers and our shareholders, make him an excellent choice to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead.”
