CTO and executive vice president, Opsware For Tim Howes, the solutions for the big problems facing IT boil down to a single word: automation. As CTO for Opsware (formerly LoudCloud), he helped the company transform itself from a managed services provider to a developer of IT automation software. Howes helped invent LDAP and is co-creator of the Data Center Markup Language, an emerging standard that allows disparate IT management systems to talk to one another. Howes believes automation is essential to realizing the vision of utility computing, where businesses can consume — and pay for — just the computing services they need. Automation may also help systems identify and patch security holes before they can be exploited. “How do you take the explosion of complexity we’ve seen over the last few years and get it under control?” Howes asks. “It’s way too complex to manage manually. That’s where automation comes in.”Back to 2005 CTO 25 Award winners DatabasesTechnology Industry