Modec International is a U.S. subsidiary of Modec Incorporated, which is Japanese. I have global responsibilities for all of Modec with regard to IT. From that standpoint I'm looking at how we can apply appropriate solutions across the entire organization and take us from being a small to medium-sized company to a large, global enterprise.

I took a couple of programming classes in college just to see what it was about. I didn't really enjoy the development side of things, but I came to realize that computers were starting to take over, and that a lot of organizations weren't really focused on the support of that technology. So I recognized pretty early on that trying to get all of those different systems to work together was going to be a big issue, and that intrigued me.

We have two sides to our business. One is an engineering and project management side that constructs floating platforms for our customers. The other side operates and manages those floating platforms. The challenge is in supporting groups of people that are focused on different variables: on the project side, time and money; and on the operational side, quality and having a platform that will operate successfully for 20 years without major reengineering.

We deal with tier one manufacturers. That allows us to build systems on day one that will operate efficiently years later. We pay a little bit more for our technology, but we gain that back through being more focused and efficient because we have fewer problems. We don't have to deal with the day-to-day operational issues that a lot of older equipment and nonstandard hardware can cause.

I'm a big proponent of using business partners. We're a growing company, and we can't do it all ourselves. So we allow the experts to come and assist us whenever necessary. And we make sure that the business owners are a part of the decision-making process. We can be an influencer, but ultimately, the business makes the call on what technology we implement.

Currently it's very limited. We moved away from Novell and open source to Microsoft primarily because I wasn't comfortable with its long-term vision and the degree of flexibility that it gave us. We're implementing an IP telephony system with some Linux components. We have some firewalls that are running Linux, and some other things. I don't want to get into managing those variables because to me, it adds complexity and cost to my environment that I don't necessarily need. I'm going to leave that to my vendors, and they can create the tools and the platforms that I need to run. Let them manage that and support that for me.

Well, for me it's been great. The platform has been very stable. We've had a lot of success with it. I mean, with any technology that you implement, there are always issues because each environment has its own unique variables. But I think overall, with our business partners and the support of Microsoft, we've had a lot of great success.

In the role I'm in today, I'm more involved in business-related problems than I am with technology-related issues. So if I had only ten minutes to spend, I'd go talk to technical people. They're the ones who are going to have the knowledge and the opinions, and the real-world experience.

I think there's a great opportunity there for anybody. The problem is that people now expect IT to always work, the way their phones do at home; and you have the added complexity of extending your environment securely so that people can work from home, use mobile devices, and work wirelessly. The reality is that people want to be able to work the way they work all the time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, no matter where they go in the world. That's a lot of pressure on any organization. So it's good and bad from that standpoint, but I think the challenge of it is just a blast.

My oldest brother won't be happy with me, but I'm probably a Star Wars kind of guy. I grew up watching Star Trek, so I've seen both sides, but the futuristic piece of Star Wars was just a little bit more innovative than in Star Trek.