Qualcomm CIO: Norm Fjeldheim

Dan Farber: Norm thanks for joining me

Norm Fjeldheim: Thank you Dan.

Dan: Now Qualcomm is a company that deals with the wireless world, phones all over the world. But as a company are you totally wireless?

Norm: Yeah we have seen a big shift in our employee base from desktop computers to laptop computers and certainly most of those are enabled with our technology so that employees can get access to the internet and back access to Qualcomm from anywhere that they are working. People work from all over the place. I had an employee that was doing work while he was at the race track one weekend. Another employee was able to come to the holiday party. He was normally on call and would have been home. He was able to come to the holiday party, brought his laptop and was so excited because he was able to show me how he was able to correct a down server right there from his laptop at the holiday party. That technology that we put out there enabled that to happen.

Dan: Now as a company that's in the wireless world, have you gone to the degree where you have the full converged wireless voice over IP network.

Norm: We have a voice over IP network. It's been very successful for us. We are actually testing out a new technology that Verizon has been trialing with us, where my cell phone is now my office phone. So I gave up my VOIP phone on my desk and now I can do five digit dialing from my cell phone anywhere on the campus and it goes right into our PBX, I can see who's calling me, phones rollover, so my cell phone is now my office phone.

Dan: I just came back from what was called Web 2.0 Expo and a lot of the talk there on the enterprise side was using some of the tools of Web 2.0 such as RSS, and wikis and blogs and predicted that markets to really help organizations to collaborate better. Is that something that you're focused on?

Norm: Absolutely. We've been really having great success with wikis in particular. We took basically the open source tools that are available, brought them in, and just enabled the security, put the infrastructure behind them and just turned them loose. And said 'here you go employees, do whatever you want with the wikis,' and it's been phenomenal, the growth. We've just seen an explosion in the number of wikis, small wikis to do just small teamwork, large wikis for managing large projects; and it's been something that I didn't even anticipate how much use and the number of different uses that we would see employees put wikis to.

Dan: Now you're seeing a lot of use and a lot of numbers of wikis but is that translating into productivity. Is it anything you can measure?

Norm: It's hard to draw a direct comparison from productivity to usage but we certainly see a lot of demand, we see people saying 'this is really working well for me, my projects are going better, I can work with the folks that are overseas, that are in other engineering offices around the country,' so in that sense we are getting a lot of positive feedback from our employees who are saying 'this is something that we are depending on now, we need more of it.' We've also deployed other technologies that do similar things, document e-room has been exceedingly popular for us. We can't deploy those fast enough. That is a little bit more of a structured collaboration tool, it's tied in with our document repository and that's been very very popular more on the business side where they want IT to do a little bit more to provide a little structure for them. The wikis have been extremely popular really in the engineering side where the engineers want to do a little bit more on their own and they have been the ones to come up with kind of the new and innovative uses of the wikis as a tool to help them work and get their work done.

Dan: Now we hear about the consumerization of the enterprise which I don't think it's very accurate but are your employees and you have 11,000 around the world, are they bringing in some of these consumer kinds of applications in the workplace and are they impacting how you manage IT?

Norm: Yeah. In fact a lot of what we are trying to do is enable our products to be picked up and used in the commercial market space so we're always seeing people bring those ideas in so we enable people to bring in ideas. We support a wide variety of platforms. We support different email clients, we certainly support lots of phones, that's always a good business for us; but we see people bring in open source and say 'Hey I'd like to try this out, you know, is this something we can support.' So IT helps enable people to try out things and see what works and I'm a big believer in the Darwin theory of technology evaluation. We will bring it in, and try it out, and if it survives, it'll grow and do well. If it doesn't it'll die out and IT will stop supporting it.

Dan: But aren't there some issues around that, that the employees are bringing in software and services and using services that might not be secure that could provide issues where you might have vulnerabilities?

Norm: Great. Absolutely. You nailed it. The only absolute that is in place is security. Employees cannot do anything that is going to endanger or open up our intellectual property. We are very tight on our security practices around protecting our intellectual property. One area of IT that has been fully funded for the last five or six years is our security practice. So we've been very focused on protecting our intellectual property. We use a lot of different tools, it's a multilayer approach to security, it is something that we take very very seriously and monitor closely what is going on in our environment.

Dan: Certainly your intellectual property, all the patents that you have, would create an environment in which that could walk out the door any day or people are trying to poke in and get at it, so you mentioned layered security approach and are there any techniques or tools that you've found to be most successful in making you feel more secure?

Norm: Yeah we take an interesting approach. I don't know that many people that take this approach. We take a detective approach to security.

Dan: Inspector Cluseau?

Norm: Yeah. Hopefully not falling down as much as he did but the idea is that we don't try and prevent everything from happening. Trying to anticipate every single attack or every single vulnerability is very difficult. So what we do is have lots of things that monitor, lots of logging and auditing, and we keep track of all the things that are going on in our environment, and we look for patterns of behavior, we look for anomalies in the normal patterns of activity. So we can detect certain kinds of things happening and those things have often been things we will go investigate further and drill in, and flags will go off. We also have the ability if something comes up we can go back in history and say 'ok what was happening at that point in time?'

Dan: Do you have your own network operations center to monitor everything around the world?

Norm: Absolutely. Our operations center is here in San Diego. We have a secondary one in India that monitors essentially third shift but also monitors what's going on in our India region. Those are very critical components for our IT infrastructure.

Dan: In terms of your infrastructure, many companies and CIO's that I talk to, are very been focused over the last few years on consolidation, on virtualization, and on really getting their data centers so they are much more efficient. How are you doing on that track?

Norm: We've been focused on consolidation for quite a while and we went early on to virtualization. Our data center now is about 60% virtual, 65%.

Dan: And what kind of utilization are you getting on server storage?

Norm: We went from about 30% virtualization in storage to about 80% these days. So we went from almost all direct attached to now nearly everything is SAND or network attached storage. On the CPU side, we went probably tripled utilization on our server side. It's been a phenomenal technology. We estimate at least 15 million in savings over the last 3 years. Hardware, power, cooling, all those things data center floor space savings. By not having to deploy as many pieces of hardware, in some cases we are running 18 to 1, virtual servers on top of a single piece of hardware. It's been a really successful program for us.

Dan: Now are you taking the step of outsourcing some of your software applications in the software as a service model?

Norm: We have. Salesforce.com has been a successful approach for us. That's been an excellent tool. We tend to run lots of small call centers division by division so Saleforce.com enables us to actually do that and we deploy very it quickly and very easily. As a new product line comes up, they want to set up a call center to manage that and IT has been able to respond very quickly as a result.

Dan: Now do you that software as a service model going deeper into the data center such as ERP applications?

Norm: We're hoping to. That's our plan. We're certainly deploying that type of infrastructure within our environment. We want to enable SOA. It's been something we see as a very positive trend within the industry. I've been pushing our vendors to be open standard so they can collaborate with each other around this kind of middleware and really enable software as a service to basically better support our customers.

Dan: What do you have in place to measure the effectiveness of the IT investments that you make, because we hear a lot about trying to align business with IT and to focus on business outcomes as opposed to how much uptime or SLAs?

Norm: That's been a challenge, to be honest with you. It's something that we're constantly working at. Trying to make sure that the IT initiatives are aligned with the business. I think we do a very good job of that, we collaborate very closely with the business. But getting the measurable results, we're constantly fine-tuning that. Making sure what IT investments are being made actually show up on the bottom lines.

Dan: Now we were talking earlier about some of the W eb 2.0 technologies and how they are allowing your teams to collaborate better. Qualcomm is a company that is very much focused on R&D, on being a patent factory if you will, so how do you maintain from the IT perspective, that culture of innovation?

Norm: That's been a fun thing for me to work on because it is a challenge. You want to make sure that people don't get so caught up in cost savings that they lose sight of that we are trying to be creative and need to come up with new ways to do things; cause that's really what adds value to the company.

Dan: Because we hear about companies where 65, 80 percent is going into maintenance and operations which doesn't leave a whole lot left over for innovation.

Norm: Right. Right now we just completed a measurement in our applications area and 50% of what IT is spending on applications is going into innovation. That's driven by the business. If you go deeper into IT and look at the traditional networks and servers and the things that people tend to view more as a cost center, what I've tried to do there is say to the team, 'you know we're going to create a fund that is towards innovation, towards trying out new things,' so we set aside a portion of our budget for that. I also let the teams know that if they come up with an idea that saves money, they can utilize that savings within their department to look at new technology to deploy that to keep that innovation factor going. Within the IT department, it becomes a self funding model where the savings they achieve by putting in new ideas get rolled back into IT to fund further exercises.

Dan: What are some examples of where you have been able to roll back money into those organizations and fund new innovation?

Norm: Virtualization started off that way. The team came to me and said, 'Hey we'd like to try this out. We need about 250,000 dollars to try this out.' This is about three and a half years ago and I said, 'Alright. Let's go do that. It's worth funding,' and they started down that road and then the money they were able to save by not buying servers, we took out of the server budget and funded it back into the virtualization and then it became a self funding project, taking the savings from the hardware side, and funding the project on the virtualization side. Now it became something of a savings engine for us, so we were actually able to return a large percentage of the dollars we saved back to the business as well.

Dan: Well Norm, Thanks very much for speaking with me.

Norm: Thank you, Dan.

Dan: I've been speaking with Norm Fjeldheim, who is the CIO of Qualcomm. For CIO Sessions, I'm Dan Farber. Thanks for watching.