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| F E A T U R E Most Valuable Readers David Gillett, Enterprise Networking Services Manager, Niku Corp., Redwood City, Calif. | ||
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October 2, 2000 Eight months later, following a successful IPO and a string of acquisitions, the company had grown to 850 people in 15 locations worldwide.
DG: Managing the growth of Niku's network. NWC: Do you have any strategic regrets? DG: I should have made the transition to networking earlier. I like it. NWC: What has been your biggest struggle, technologically? DG: Finding good people. NWC: How about politically? DG: Network security involves trade-offs between keeping the network secure and enabling people to do their jobs. Funding also gets political. It can be difficult to argue why what's there isn't good enough. NWC: Where were you two years ago in your IT career? DG: I was doing network security at General Magic, a company that started as an Apple spin-off...Since then, I've moved into network management ... General Magic's network was a server farm in one location; at Niku, we have multiple workstations with LAN links between them. NWC: What do you expect your job to be like in two years? DG: I don't know. We're doubling every few months. Also, we're making a transition from VPN technology over the Internet to a single backbone. Two years from now, much of that might migrate to frame relay or something like it. NWC: How do you measure IT success? DG: Network invisibility. NWC: What technology or tool has made your life easier? DG: VPN on the dial-up side. It gets my IT group out of running modem banks. NWC: What emerging technologies show the most promise for Niku? DG: We're starting to get into limited deployments of Gigabit Ethernet. Also DSL. NWC: What is the smartest technology company? DG: Cisco. NWC: Which company tells the best marketing story? DG: Cisco. NWC: What's the best disaster-recovery beverage? DG: Chocolate milk -- nature's most perfect food. NWC: How many late-night pizzas does it take to deploy a new OS? DG: The important thing is that at least half of them not have onions or green peppers.
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