Taking care

FST talks to Dele Oladapo about the IT challenges facing Prudential Financial.

What are your current IT priorities and what are you focusing on right now?

Dele Oladapo. We recently in-sourced data center infrastructure services in Japan, and we want to take a look at our global data center footprint and at opportunities to leverage that and trade up on some of our VC capabilities.

If we have an opportunity to be more efficient with our actual data center footprint, we certainly want to take the opportunity to do that. So we're going through due diligence on that, and we need to make sure we understand what the options are and lay out a strategy. It will probably be a multi-year strategy to get to a place where we feel comfortable with our data center footprint, and where we also feel comfortable with the VC capabilities that we have both domestically as well as internationally.

We had two major business units in Tokyo, and now we're providing data center infrastructure services to those two business units. So we've got two data centers in the United States, and then we also have two data centers in Japan. That total of four data centers is something we want to look at. Can we go down to two? Should we have three?

You've been with the company for 13 years. What have been the major changes you've seen during that period?

DO. One of the most significant changes was going public. When I started at Prudential it was a mutually owned company. When you go public, you've got to answer to Wall Street, so the pressure to drive revenues and compress costs so you can hit the bottom line and hit numbers on a quarterly basis becomes intense. That as the overlay on the IT side shifted some of our priorities around.

We had to look at time to market, at our overall architecture and flexibility within that architecture, at our ability to leverage virtualization, our ability to look at a workforce optimization strategy where we can get the right resources in different parts of the globe so that we can lower our overall costs in terms of headcount, but not at the impact of the quality of the service we provide.

Has the emphasis placed on elements of the CIO role changed as well?

DO. Certainly alignment to the business has become extremely important. At the end of the day, if we don't deliver to the business needs, and if we deliver in a vacuum, we may deliver great technology, but the question is, are we really delivering value? So alignment to the business is extremely important.

We have a number of different touch-points with the business to make sure that we're getting their requirements and that our strategies are aligned with the direction they're trying to go in. At the high level, 'Faster, better, cheaper!' is always the mantra. How that correlates into the specific strategies that we have to execute is where the rubber hits the road as far as the alignment goes.

What about the allegation made in some quarters that the people within IT are not as focused on implementing the technology as they should be?

DO. From a technology perspective, there are concerns around security and compliance; those things obviously have to be vetted. And as the technology capability ramps up to the point where bandwidth and storage become such commodities in terms of price, then the question starts to become if the price point is attractive, and if the compliance and the regulatory concerns are being addressed because the offering is becoming more mature, what are the adjustments that have to be made with the corporate IT shops to be able to take advantage and consume those adjustments?

If you look at the client/server paradigm, there was a shift from the mainframe paradigm where you wanted to be able to give each of the application owners more decision-making power over what they want to do. If you look at virtualization and cloud, it's more going back to the mainframe paradigm where you have resources that you carve up within virtual images, and you're just offering that back up to the end-users so they can be abstracted from the decision around infrastructure and focus on their business objectives.

Which model are you taking at the moment? Are using mainframes, or concentrating on distributed?

We've got all the main platforms: we've got mainframe, we've got distributed. In Fortune 500 companies, I don't think you will find one flavor versus another. With startups, you're seeing more of an open-source architecture and a distributed architecture. But for the large firms that have been around for decades, you'll typically see all three of the platforms, and interoperability of all of the platforms is where the challenge comes from.

In talking to some of the cloud computing vendors, the thing that I find interesting is that they have systems management capabilities and provisioning capabilities, but it's still very much platform-focused. Our applications are interdependent across all three platforms, so, when we talk about being able to consume a cloud offering, it has to be able to work within our actual architecture, and our architecture is a combination of all three platforms.

What are the current main challenges within the mainframe environment?

DO. I wouldn't say we have challenges, per se. When we talk about cloud computing services, we're going to have multiple platforms and if there's a component of the environment that we want to put out into the cloud, we need to be confident that it will be able to integrate well into the environment we have.

Our integration across the three platforms is very robust, but that's important to the team that we have that manages that environment. So when we talk about maybe moving a component, that knowledge of how that integration works is one of the prerequisites that we'd have to understand.

What are the key technologies in terms of implementing innovation in the architecture space?

DO. We have a very robust systems management capability so that we can see proactively the availability of our hardware as well as the performance. So we've already got a lot of the right focus, and we're going in the right direction. I think the question starts to become understanding what are the criteria in terms of cost and capability that would make a public offering on the cloud, for instance, more appealing?

If we're able to achieve the economies of scale that a vendor would offer, then, if all things were the same, of course we would rather control it. So what are those price points that vendors on the outside would have to get to for us to have the incentive to make a change?

Quite frankly, that gives us some guidance on the negotiations we do internally. Because with the volume that we have, I'm not seeing a material difference in the cost that they would offer for the service versus what we already do internally. Now, if you're a smaller shop of 50 to 100 servers, then those kind of offers make a lot more sense.

It's been a tough couple of years for the financial services industry in general. Has that had an impact on IT spend or on the type of projects that you're rolling out?

DO. Being productive and being able to execute and implement, particularly in hard times, is the differentiating factor with the companies that not only survive but flourish and thrive. So for example, our ability to in-source infrastructure services in Japan, you know, was a material save for the corporation. So that ability to save turned into a major initiative on the IT side.

We've been extremely busy from a market perspective, thanks to the services we have to provide now both to domestic as well as international business partners.

Dele Oladapo is VP of Information Systems for Prudential Financial.