by Peter High, published on Forbes
9-29-15
For the past 18 years, Mark Brewer has been the CIO of Seagate the $14 billion provider of electronic data storage products. That is an unusually long tenure, and it means that he has been present for a dramatic evolution, as the company has gone from a manufacturer of disk drives to a cloud-centric company, as well. When Brewer began at Seagate, there were 150 companies making disk drives. Now Seagate is among the last in the field. In that time, the company has diversified into solid state products, cloud services and technology, with plans to diversify further. In addition to traditional IT functions, Brewer also has responsibility for manufacturing execution systems in the factories, which is typically under the purview of Engineering or Operations functions.
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Peter High: I thought we would begin with a description of Seagate’s business. No doubt many of our listeners would know of Seagate, but would love to hear in your own world, especially as a veteran of the organization, what it is that Seagate does and also your role in IT.
Mark Brewer: Seagate Technology is one of the long-term tech companies. We have been making disk drives for a long time. There used to be hundred fifty companies doing that; it is down to just a handful now. So we are in the traditional disk drive space. We also have solid state products, some cloud services and technology that we are now selling, and so we are diversifying a little bit. But we are essentially located in the storage space. That is who we are at Seagate. I am the CIO here. I have been the CIO for a long time. I have the traditional IT functions and then I also have responsibility for the manufacturing execution systems in our factories, which typically is in engineering or operations, but here it is in IT.
High: And speaking of your role as CIO, you have an unusually long tenure as the IT lead for Seagate—nearly 18 years—which is really extraordinary at a time when the average tenure is still between four and five years for Chief Information Officers. One of the things that really intrigued me as I thought about that, Mark, is no doubt you have introduced—perhaps even your team built– technologies that you have had to replace; that you have had to transition from the pre-cloud computing period to now more of a software-as-a-service type model solution. You became CIO at a time when offshoring was not necessarily as much a lever that IT leaders were choosing to pull. Now that is much more part of the bailiwick of IT, and again a lever IT leaders choose to pull, and in fact create an IT operation that is more efficient, just to mention a couple of trends. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that evolution over the 18 years, and how IT has changed and how IT specifically at Seagate has.
Brewer: It is interesting to be at a place and see things come in and go out, and we have definitely been here long enough to do that. I tell people that fundamentally I am responsible for everything: everything that is a problem is my fault because I have been here so long. We have had large turnovers in technology. We certainly went through the Y2K era here, and then the dot com era, and then all the supply chain optimization that people did for a while, and then the downturns in 2008/2009. So it has been an interesting journey along the way.
We have done all of the things you mentioned. We have big cloud plays with OpenStack, and we use Google’s applications and Salesforce in the cloud. We have done offshoring. We have big operations in Asia. We have a bit of an advantage in that a lot of our footprint is sitting in Asia, so I have a majority of the IT staff sitting in Malaysia and Thailand and China and Singapore. So we are a global organization IT-wise and leverage really great talent around the world to do the things that we have to do. And then we have third party partners in India and elsewhere that we use at times for projects and for support. We have gone through that whole role. One of the dangers of being a place so long is that you could have made a decision seven or eight years ago on a particular item and in your mind that decision has been made, but the world has changed in seven or eight years, and you need to make a different decision. I think that is one of the risks I have, and I talk about it here, and I talk about it with my staff and with others, that I have to be careful, and my staff has to be careful, that we are not locked into a decision that we made years ago just because I have been here a long time and a some of my IT players have been here long time.
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