A recent article by Scott Lowe,  The CIO and the Cloud: Embrace, Extend, Innovate, got me thinking about how we have embraced both the cloud and the network to transform our enterprise IT practice at Juniper.

Cloud has become a “very important arrow in our quiver”. Like many other enterprises, Juniper IT set out a few years ago to modernize our application platform and migrate to the cloud...

Earlier this week I spoke on a panel with 3 other CIOs—all of us are based in Silicon Valley: Gerri Martin-Flickinger from Adobe, Mark Tonnesen from Electronic Arts, and Walter Curd from Maxim Integrated Products. Collectively, we’ve all shared a similar experience: we’re working for high tech companies, we deal with very tech-savvy users, and our IT function supports the creation of technology.

The internal Yahoo! memo about not working from home anymore has created polarizing viewpoints and heated debates. There are certainly pros and cons to both sides which have been discussed at length in on-line forums, articles, New Yorker cartoons, tweets, and even billboards on Highway 101. 

Wonder why enterprise social software tools haven’t quite taken off in the enterprise? It’s because real friends do not use words like "social networking" or " enterprise". According to Gartner, the key to social is getting employees to “opt in” because the social tool is something that engages employees and offers them a significantly better way to work. I don’t think you can take the very essence of social networking and make it template driven.  

Let me describe my personal Eureka opt-in moment.

Recently I participated in a peer-led roundtable for 20 CIOs representing companies from California, Arizona and Texas. The subject of the half-day conference: Innovation: Answers Are Obsolete, Ask Killer Questions.

Who would have thought that spending few hours at an Innovation Workshop would help flex my design thinking muscles? Who even knew that we had such muscles buried deep inside our brains? I sure didn’t.

Last week’s WSJ CIO Journal "How BYOD Become the Law of the Land" brought me down memory lane.

Last week, I spoke at Juniper’s Global Partner Conference (GPC) in Las Vegas. Like other enterprise CIOs, I am focused on driving efficiency and growth for my company.

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to step outside our Sunnyvale offices at Juniper Networks, and see the last fly-by of the Space Shuttle as it piggy-backed on top of a 747 directly over Moffett Field. What an amazing example of innovation actually flying by my very eyes.

As a networking company, rarely do we have a conversation with customers that starts with the network and does not end with the strategic business priorities, leadership and skill sets required to manage that network / IT over time.

Today Juniper released the results from our new report conducted by Forrester Consulting, “Building For the Next Billion: What The New World Of Business Means For The Network,” to understand how the exponential scale in data is helping companies capitalize on new business opportunities.

When I got started in this industry, our framework for measuring information was the physical page. We calculated data transmission in bytes and assessed the markets for our products in terms of thousands of customers. Now we think about information in terabytes and speed in gigabytes. We are creating products to reach billions of customers.

I recently asked Juniper customer, New York Stock Exchange Euronext CIO Peter Leukert, how his organization is navigating this exponential scale…

For most of human history, people lived in an incremental world. Society advanced through a step-by-step accumulation of new ideas; progress was defined by a gradual improvement in living standards as tasks that once consumed most of our time became routine.

But something remarkable has happened in our lifetimes. Change that once took decades now happens in weeks, days, or even seconds. Capabilities that we only dreamed about a few years ago have fundamentally changed how we work and connect with each other.

We’re moving from an incremental world to one where things happen on an exponential scale. What used to be millions of customers, millions of devices and millions of transactions is now in the billions. Today, there are now 6 billion cell phone subscriptions in use around the globe. And, Facebook recently topped 1 billion users. 

Last month, while attending Microsoft’s Global CIO Summit, I spoke on a panel moderated by IDG’s Michael Friedenberg. He asked me: Should a CIO report to the CEO or not?

I think that Apple is taking a big bite out of the Enterprise, and this is a good thing. I wonder if we (in IT) created this BYOD problem ourselves by ignoring an obvious phenomenon: the staggering rise/reemergence of Apple!