housegroover Posted May 11, 2004 Share Posted May 11, 2004 Microsoft Corp, looking to save more than $US100 million on its own internal technology costs, on Friday appointed a new chief information officer responsible for managing one of the most complex information technology systems in the industry. Ron Markezich, formerly responsible for managing call centres, help desks and other IT infrastructure at the world's largest software maker, will now be responsible for making sure that Microsoft's own 300,000 devices - including desktop personal computers, laptops, networked server computers, and other machines - work without glitches. "We're a fairly complex company," Markezich said in a telephone interview. "We've got a quite a few demands that the growth of the business puts on us." Adding to the complexity of the task is Microsoft's longtime habit of "eating its own dog food", or using software still in development for testing purposes, before it is sold to customers. "We use Microsoft products very aggressively," Markezich said, adding that there would be no change to that policy. Microsoft is also aiming to take more than $US100 million out of the cost of running its infrastructure, Markezich said, by adopting its own technology to consolidate hardware and software systems. Another challenge for Markezich will be to make sure that the software running on Microsoft's systems is kept up-to-date, particularly since the company's own servers were hit last year by the SQL Slammer worm that slowed world global Internet traffic and caused disruption in flight systems and even automatic teller machines. When SQL Slammer, targeting machines running Microsoft's SQL database software, hit a year ago, several machines in Microsoft were affected because they had not been patched with the necessary software updates and fixes. "One of our priorities as an organisation has been to make sure that we embrace trustworthy computing in everything we do," Markezich said. Full Article: http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/10/1084041304562.html Source: theage.com.au Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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