News

Google CIO Changes His Tune, Heads for EMI

By Juan Carlos Perez

April 03, 2008 — IDG News Service —

EMI Music has hired Google's Chief Information Officer Douglas Merrill to be president of its digital business division, the latest high-profile executive to seek greener pastures away from the Googleplex.

However, it's hard to imagine that Google will have much trouble finding a good replacement for Merrill, considering that it's a company crawling with engineers, "a nerd's paradise" as a company official once called it.

In that sense, the loss of its CIO might be less painful for Google than, for example, the recent defection of Sheryl Sandberg, Google's vice president of global online sales and operations, to Facebook, where she became chief operating officer.

After all, Merrill was one among a very strong team of Google engineering vice presidents, including Vint Cerf, Stuart Feldman, Vic Gundotra, Udi Manber and Nelson Mattos, not to mention the company's top three executives -- Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin -- who are all computer scientists. In that sense, Merrill's departure might have been felt more at a company that wasn't in the IT industry and had a limited number of computer scientists and engineers on its staff.

Still, Merrill's defection is definitely a public-relations blow for Google, which in the past year had apparently made a conscious effort to build up its CIO's public profile. Merrill spoke at industry events and granted one-on-one interviews to IT and general-interest magazines, ultimately achieving a higher level of recognition than the average CIO. This might explain why news of his job change has resonated so strongly across the blogosphere and in the technology press.

Certainly, the job of Google CIO is a big one and it remains to be seen if Merrill's departure will result in any degradation or destabilization of the IT services provided to employees, partners and customers, always a possibility after a high-level change like this one.

By the same token, time will tell if Merrill made the right decision leaving the Google environment, with its heavy emphasis on computer science and engineering, to go to a music company. The music industry's aggressive approach to combat Internet-enabled piracy via litigation has earned it the scorn of many Internet and computer companies. Merrill's Ph.D. in psychology might come in handy as he tries to instill a spirit of technology innovation in his new company.

EMI said Wednesday that Merrill's job will be to grow the record company's digital music business, heading what the company calls in a news release "a new global function" encompassing digital strategy, innovation, business development, supply chain and global technology activities.

1 | 2 |next page »

Comments

Share [+]

TOOLS

Comments

Digg This

SlashDot

CENTER OF EXCELLENCE

Infrastructure

» Outbound Email and Data Loss Prevention
This report shows the findings of a recent Proofpoint and Forrester Consulting study on e-mail security, data loss prevention, and includes statistics on electronic risks.

» A Modern Approach to On-Demand Email and Data Security
Learn how Proofpoint delivers a dedicated, hosted e-mail security solution that combines state-of-the-art anti-spam and virus control.

» A Proactive Approach to e-Discovery
Learn about the key e-discovery challenges facing legal and IT departments today and how businesses can develop an e-mail archiving strategy to deal with e-discovery requests.

» The Advantages of Identity Based Encryption
Download this paper to learn why e-mail encyrption is critical to an organization's overall security architecture and the advantages of identity-based encryption.

» Global Best Practices in Email Security, Privacy and Compliance
This whitepaper discusses the latest global regulations that impact the e-mail security policies and strategies of today's enterprises, universities and government organizations.

Center sponsored by