The McCue Interview: Vodafone CIO and CTO Paul Wybrow

silicon.com chief reporter Andy McCue this week hands over the writing of the McCue Interview to editor Tony Hallett, who talks to an IT chief with a £1bn-plus annual IT budget, a second hat marked 'CTO' and an ambition to one day be a CEO.

It's a sunny, late summer's morning at Vodafone's HQ, these days a modern campus in Newbury, and the mobile operator's hybrid CIO/CTO looks completely at ease, sitting in an unassuming side office not far from dozens in his IT department. During our interview he will turn out to be open and likeable as we talk - yet to many outside the giant network operator he is an enigma.

Having occupied the top technology spot for barely a year, few can get a handle on the exact nature of the position Paul Wybrow fills or what makes him tick.

I have a strong ambition to become a CEO of a company... It will be about asking the business at some point to take a risk with me, to do a horizontal move into one of the more business functions - that's the sort of vision that I have.

-- Paul Wybrow, CIO and CTO, Vodafone

As I'll learn over the course of our interview, his rise - and future ambition - is all about balance, a balance that would seem to go far beyond a philosophy around IT or network technologies or even how to wear two hats to help efficiently run a business.

The contradictions start immediately. On first impressions, it's hard to determine his age. He's been at Vodafone since 8 August 1988 - what he calls a "very memorable start date, 8.8.88" - but it turns out he's just 43, young for such responsibility.

He doesn't sport a full head of hair but he's trim around the waist, certainly for someone who will have had to sit around the same number of grand lunchtime tables as most other major heads of IT. Later he will tell me he was swimming in Newbury's ancient 75-yard outdoor pool that morning and non-traditional sporting interests such as mountain biking, snow boarding and wind surfing all help him de-stress.

But it is perhaps the office he has graduated to where the mix is most crucial.

His background is mainly in the telecoms side of Vodafone as opposed to internal IT, and as CTO there is no one in the organisation more focused on making sure Vodafone's network technology is as good as it can be across dozens of countries with differing needs and even different mixes of mobile standards. The goal sounds simple but it's immensely complex, dealing with dozens of major telecoms equipment suppliers and making sure multibillion pound investments in things such as 3G pay off.

As CIO he must make sure IT performs across the organisation, underpinning every employee and delivering value. He oversees 4,000 permanent IT staff worldwide and about the same number of contractors.

The group is coming down to four per cent of revenue being spent on IT. Doing the sums, that still equates to a budget of £1.4bn per year, at the end-of-year group sales run rate on 31 March 2005. The decrease is driven by growing revenues and cost cutting measures. It's part of CEO Arun Sarin's pledge to the financial markets and central to a strategy common to many large companies these days, in this case going by the name One Vodafone.

Indeed, One Vodafone is something that occupies Wybrow as much as any executive within the company. He explains that while it affects "many facets" of the business, at its heart is coming up with solutions once and using them across the group.

Wybrow admits this is now in a more advanced stage on the networks side of things - for instance UK wholesale billing is now held up as the model for other group members to follow - but, taking off the CTO hat for a moment, he is accelerating progress within IT. Data centre consolidation internationally is an example.

A major part of the initiative means fewer IT systems and, with that, fewer suppliers. Right now the company "has relationships with just about every vendor imaginable" but Wybrow says Vodafone is in a better position than most now to "leverage its size". You don't have to search hard for an outside expert who would agree.

To what extent does he see outsourcing as the way forward? Wybrow has strong views on the subject.

"One of my philosophies is that you have to be pragmatic - if you bring dogma or religion into this thing it will go wrong," he says. "With outsourcing, given the scale of Vodafone, even just across Europe we can gain [a lot of the scale] efficiencies internally and reap benefits from the supplier side."

He has had experience with outsourcing - during his stint at Proximus in Belgium, ahead of his return to the UK - and also sees offshoring as having advantages on a case-by-case basis.

But he adds: "There shouldn't be a mantra for outsourcing. It's more about coming up with a strategy to get from A to B" - and very often that can be done in-house. (Continued on next page...)