A CTO gives thanks

THANKSGIVING IS upon us, and I’m already counting my blessings despite a tough year for IT. Although 2002 has been a difficult year, there are plenty of things to be thankful for in the world of IT. As I reflect on the past year, I am grateful for several things.

I am very thankful for the efforts of my staff. I frequently write about the CTO’s challenge of doing more with less, and the InfoWorld technology staff deals with many of those issues on a day-to-day basis. As resources diminish, systems administrators are running more machines, desktop support staff are supporting more users, and the work of developers has not abated. While budgets and staffing for IT are sharply reduced in many companies, the work of running IT is more complex than ever.

To help mitigate the increased workload, my staff has spent a lot of energy simplifying systems and processes to make our environment more manageable. That in itself takes strong technical vision and a lot of persistence and hard work. Making your infrastructure smaller and better-managed while maintaining and often increasing service to your customers can be a tricky balancing act. For those IT staffers who have persisted through downsizing and smaller budgets during the past year, a big thanks. When the economy improves, you will be remembered for helping pull your companies through a tough time.

Open-source development continues to make my job easier by providing solid solutions that work both technically and financially. During the boom times, a common job benefit and recruiting tool of the CTO was to sanction work on open-source projects during company time. Now that the economy has tightened, I don’t hear much about this kind of arrangement any more, yet the quality of work in the open-source community continues to be impressive because of the passion of developers committed to improving technology despite a harsh macroeconomic environment. Linux may be old hat, but the kernel continues to improve in important ways for large businesses. Although the 2.6 kernel is not expected until next summer, early benchmarks with the development 2.5 kernel indicate that the greatest performance improvements will be in environments with large multiprocessor machines that have large disks and large amounts of memory.

For the first time, Linux Beowulf clusters occupy two spots on a list of the world’s top 10 fastest supercomputers, a biannual list released by Top500.org.

In the database world, MySQL continues to improve with support for transactions, making it an increasingly viable platform for some higher-end enterprise deployments. Free Java app servers such as JBoss and inexpensive ones including Resin continue to enhance their already enterprise-ready abilities. For a CTO who needs as much price/performance as he or she can get, the ability to build a viable enterprise software stack out of these components is invaluable.

Finally, I would like to thank my fellow CTOs for leading their organizations with clear vision in difficult times. In a challenging economy, it would be easy to become disillusioned and beaten down by the heavy demands of the job. The CTOs I have met during the past year have responded to the new environment with increased vigor and determination, working harder and smarter to meet the challenge. These CTOs are setting their companies up for long-term success by positioning them for an upturn.

When the economy improves, we are all going to be thankful for that.