At the InformationWeek 500 conference in Tucson, Microsoft CIO Stuart Scott and COO Kevin Turner dished about the company’s internal IT operations, reports InformationWeek.
Scott said that almost 45% of the IT budget is spent on new product development, rather than ongoing maintenance. This compares to a previous high-water mark of about 30%. Turner (who is the former CIO of WalMart) would like the percentage dedicated to application development to hit 65%.
Consolidating data centers is key for the company. It shrunk 26 data centers to five and killed off 1,000 applications over two years, with the goal of shedding another 1,000. (Is that a strange confession for a software maker to admit?)
Obviously, virtualization plays a big role in the data-center-reduction diet. But centralizing IT also meant pulling resources out of business units – which is where most of the application reduction came from – targeting areas where business units were duplicating IT efforts. (A natural consequence when the workforce contains so many super-smart techies.)
Interestingly, Microsoft has also been pushing collaboration. Employees maintain over 300,000 blogs and wikis and the company says it tracks them through enterprise search.
Microsoft is its own first customer, too, as should be expected. Scott says he is the first one to implement any Microsoft technology coming to market.
