Shadman Zafar, CIO, Verizon Telecom

Shadman Zafar: What this allows us to do is bring together your entertainment experience with interactivity of the Internet for the end customer. Male Announcer: Shadman Zafar, CIO of Verizon Telecom talks about the company's promise to deliver the Internet on your TV with its new FiOS service and about adding social media widgets like Facebook and Twitter. Shadman Zafar: When you are watching a TV show, it actually brings the specific tweets that people are making about that program on your TV screen while you are watching that show. Male Announcer: Zafar talks to ZDNet's Sumi Das about how the company is weathering the economic downturn and where he stands on the big net neutrality debate. CIO Sessions tunes in to Verizon, next. Sumi Das: Shadman thank you so much for joining us today. Shadman Zafar: I am glad to be here, thank you for having me here. Sumi Das: Now, Verizon is a very large company. Tell us what the size and scope of your operations at Verizon Telecom is. Shadman Zafar: Verizon Telecom is sort of a leading communications provider and entertainment provider. This is our landline part of the business. We provide landline service to 20 million or so households. This includes basically you have three major product line, which is entertainment, broadband services, and basic communication services, as well as we provide the same services to small businesses. Sumi Das: You are occupying the office of CIO at Verizon at a unique time, how is your IT department coping with the current economic downturn? Has the current recession changed your strategy from one of growth to, say a defensive position? Shadman Zafar: Actually, the other way around I would say. I think in a lot of companies, specifically IT departments have focused on cost cutting, how to automate one piece, how to automate another thing, and we obviously focused on that a lot. But, I would say one of the things that differentiate the Verizon Telecom IT is that we are, we consider ourselves and continue to drive as a growth engine of the business as opposed to just say, automation and cost cutting or just the back office. And in this economic downturn, it has actually given a lot of chance for the IT employees to shine on that area where you can create products which are very cheap from capital perspective, but create tremendous value for the end customers and hence, generate the top line growth as opposed to just focusing on the bottom line. Sumi Das: So in other words, the types of the investment you are making have shifted a little bit then in this current time. Shadman Zafar: I would say certainly that the technical investments on growth initiatives are as high, if not higher as they are on sort of cost management efforts. Sumi Das: What are some of the keys to innovation then when it comes to IT? Specifically, how do you promote innovation and creativity within your organization when you know a lot of the time people are focused on getting the job done for the day? Shadman Zafar: Well, I tell you one thing, creativity is a funny thing that when you bring and give our people opportunity to be creative, they will go above and beyond the call of duty to do that, because that is when the job becomes fun. You want to do extra to bring your creativity out. It is almost like doing art. So, what we do is the fact that IT teams are focused on actually doing and focusing on the growth for the business as a great incentive for a lot of our employees to innovatively come up with ideas, submit those ideas and create new business cases around those. So, what I promote is a couple of things. Number one is ask people continuously that you know, don't just do what you are being told, but promote, get into the business, propose ideas. So, as many ideas come from IT teams, as from business teams for the new opportunities in the business, so that is number one. Number two, is to give an opportunity for people to try and fail quickly. It is quick failures which are important as opposed to coming up with grand big programs that takes multi years to do, then after that you will have 50-50 chance, anyway if it goes one way or to the other. Sumi Das: Why do you say quick failures are important? Shadman Zafar: Because that generates quick learning in the organization, you learn that this is the right idea. This is a quick course correction allows you to be fast in the market. Fast in the market and course correct to get to the right solution. Sumi Das: Now, Verizon is really betting big on its FiOS service which delivers television as well as other services over fiber optic networks. For those of us who are not yet familiar with FiOS, explain the technology behind it to us. Shadman Zafar: So, FiOS is a fiber optic all the way into your house. What basically what this is, it is the way I like to describe it, essentially we are replacing end to end a hundred year old network started with Graham Bell and putting in glass fiber all the way into people's houses, as opposed to putting it halfway through, or to your central office. This is a fiber coming in to your house. That enables us to basically have almost a limitless capacity to deliver services into the house. Sumi Das: And Verizon has just launched a widget store on FiOS as well, now how are you going to ensure that this is a true value to the consumer versus just a novelty. What are you trying to achieve? Shadman Zafar: What we are focused on is get the data from our customers to see what they want to do, to evolve their entertainment experience, and evolve their overall communications and broadband experience. So, I will give you an example on widget bazaar you said. This is actually one of our innovation platforms, first in the industry to have fully interactive application platform on television screen. This is an application store if you will, and what this allows us to do is bring together your entertainment experience with interactivity of the Internet for the end customers. So, it is not like putting Internet on TV. It is basically driving what customers wanted to do. So, we launched a couple of applications, you may have heard of you put Twitter on, so it is not that you know, you just can tweet from TV. What it is, is you can then, when you are watching a TV show it actually brings the specific tweets that people are making about that program on your TV screen while you are watching that show. So, it is very, very relevant to how the entertainment experience is evolving, same thing we did with Facebook. We brought this as an application here. Now with this integration, you take a picture and it pops up on somebody's TV. So, it is easy integration of application, so you got the best screen in the house, best audiovisual equipment and now you connect that with other devices in your home through all of our networks and the software stack that actually brings these services together. Sumi Das: You have said that FiOS created somewhat of a culture shock within the IT department of Verizon, can you describe some of the challenges you have experiences internally then. Shadman Zafar: So, I like to say this often that with FiOS the IT has become a service itself in some sense in the sense that traditionally IT used to be just a back office. Now, our systems are part and parcel of the experience of some of our products. So, what that means is that instead of being in front of you know tens of thousands of employees, a lot of our systems are visible to you know millions of customers. Sumi Das: And finally, there is an ongoing debate around net neutrality right now, what is Verizon's stance on this issue? Shadman Zafar: You know, what I like to say is that I see a boundaryless world. I mean, honestly to some extent, in my opinion this is an older debate, and some of it has kind of ways technology has grown. I do not see boundaries. I think that is a good idea. We should have -- I see software, I am a software guy. I don't see pipes one way or the other. I think anybody should be able to innovate anywhere. We do a lot of software development. We build networks. We want to do that. Other people come on to our network, builds software. That is great. We love doing that. So we are actually, we love the idea of boundaryless innovation. Anybody should innovate anywhere. Sumi Das: Shadman thank you so much for sharing your insights today. Shadman Zafar: Absolutely, thank you. Sumi Das: I have been speaking to Shadman Zafar, CIO of Verizon Telecom. For CIO Sessions, I am Sumi Das, thanks for watching.

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