Google Grabs New CIO

Google has plucked top Morgan Stanley exec Benjamin Fried to serve as its CIO, according to media reports this week.

The exec, who currently serves as managing director of Morgan Stanleys technology department, replaces Douglas Merrill, who recently quit the search giant to become the head of EMI’s digital music business.

Columbia University alum Fried will soon be responsible for a massive -- yet highly secretive -- global network of servers and storage, which serves as the foundation for Google’s push for world domination.

Not bad for someone who cites his passion for Ultimate Frisbee on his Columbia home page and is a partner in Fra’Mani handcrafted Salami.

While Fried’s geek credentials are clearly impeccable, the exec also has an existing relationship with Google and is listed as a reference customer for the Google Search appliance on the search giant’s Website.The Morgan Stanley exec also helped design the deliciously titled Decision-Theoretic Scheduler for Heuristic Research for Google’s big buddy NASA. For the laymen out there, the scheduler, which Fried designed during a leave of absence from Columbia, is an application for scheduling experiments on orbiting telescopes.

Everything suggests that Fried will fit right in with the pet-obsessed, pajama-clad brainiacs of Mountain View, Calif., although there is one question that still needs to be resolved: Will he break with the company’s technology tradition and tell the world how Google actually does what it does?

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