He outsourced nonessential services, tapping Salesforce.com to handle CRM, Grand Central as an integration hub, Blue Matrix for research content creation, and AppShop for Oracle financial applications. “I viewed it as an opportunity where you can try newer things, but you have to justify it by hard numbers,” O’Connor says. National Bank Financial (NBF), one of Canada’s largest investment banks, snapped up Putnam Lovell this summer. But O’Connor is sticking by the Web services model. “The application infrastructure we are using is still valid after the acquisition,” he says. Some of NBF’s business units are now moving under Putnam Lovell’s Web services umbrella. Under O’Connor’s outsourcing strategy, Putnam Lovell was able to concentrate on its core competency — financial services, including asset management, banking, insurance, and investment. “We spent a lot of effort and time seeing where we could reduce costs,” O’Connor explains. “We looked at different ways of accomplishing things.” — J.M. Return to InfoWorld’s 25 Most Influential CTOs 2002 Software Development