A daily problem CIOs face is how to deal with legacy systems—systems built decades ago in what now feels like prehistoric times. Buried deep down in the depths of organizations live these scary, monolithic fossils—Mainframe-otops, ERP Rex, COBOL-odons and more—created in a much different world than the one we live in today. The challenge has now hit the radar of CEOs, as company leaders realize that they cannot innovate fast enough thanks to the cost and complexity of legacy systems.

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In part one of this Q&A series, I sat down with Jeff Rauch, vice president of IT at ICW Group, a leading national insurance carrier with over 300,000 customers and 700 employees. Jeff shared his thoughts on the changing role of IT, how he is thinking about insurtech disruptors and the future of the insurance industry as a whole. (Disclosure: ICW Group is a customer of my employer, MuleSoft.)

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When people and companies grow wildly successful, we often forget that they have the same number of hours in the day as everyone else. Yet, we often find ourselves speculating, how do they do what they do…and how do they do it so well?

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Organizations today are under increasing pressure to move faster to stay relevant. It requires CIOs to embrace a new way of thinking about IT, one that distributes the IT function throughout the business rather than concentrates it in a single team.

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The tech climate is rapidly changing and putting increasing pressure on businesses to move faster. However, in recent years, we’ve seen digital transformation hindered by a misalignment between business and technology leaders. This has had a severe impact on the speed at which businesses can deliver products and services.

Last week, I spoke with Harry Stebbings on the Official SaaStr Podcast about this topic (and more!). Check out the episode here or below.

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Businesses today are going through radical digital transformation in an attempt to create better customer experiences. From mobile to Facebook Messenger to connected home devices, customers today engage with businesses through a variety of digital channels. A single consumer, for example, can have over 900 digital interactions when purchasing a car.

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Today, a company can spring up in a matter of weeks. Perhaps a new idea is planted overnight during a hackathon and germinated in a garage over a couple of weeks using unlimited cloud computing power, free developer tools and open APIs. Then, the startup might get watered by incubators and accelerators like Idealab and Y Combinator, helping to direct the young company toward the sunlight while sprinkling it with occasional funding to grow its products and team.

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In this Q&A, Splunk CIO Declan Morris shares insight into the technology approaches that will enable Splunk to double revenue in the next three years.

The role of IT has evolved from a centralized delivery model to IT as a service, where IT-owned capabilities are being offered as a service throughout the business to drive new levels of agility. One CIO embracing the changing role is Declan Morris of Splunk, which enables organizations to turn massive streams of data into operational intelligence.

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Networks have always been at the heart of our society, defining our relationships, creating our experiences and ultimately shaping our lives. From the steam railways that enabled commerce between cities and towns, to the cables that paved the way for global communication over telephones and then the internet, networks have a history of redefining our way of life.  

More recently, the internet has given rise to virtual networks that allow us to connect to vast computing resources,

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It had just turned 2 a.m. on April 18th, 2003. I was getting ready to release my first open source project, and I was about to pull the trigger on a name. I settled on MULE as I was trying to solve the hard, unrelenting work of connecting applications and data—MULE was going to take the “donkey work” out of integration. What I didn’t know was that I was choosing the stock ticker symbol for a company that would go on to solve much bigger problems for companies globally.

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