Ralph Loura, formerly CIO of Clorox, will now have that same title at Hewlett-Packard’s enterprise business unit and will report to the company’s global CIO Ramon Baez, the company confirmed early Thursday. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal (registration required.)
Loura may be familiar to Gigaom readers: He appeared on a CIO panel at Structure 2013 where he discussed such issues as IT department worries about vendor lock-in in the cloud and the growing influence CMOs have on IT spending. And in one pertinent comment, he noted that consumer-oriented companies such as Google were making a play for enterprise IT spending but as of then were “talking the talk but… not backing it up yet….In the enterprise you need someone to call.”
HP definitely has that enterprise-sales-and-support DNA.
One thing I’d love to ask Loura once he gets settled in (he hasn’t started yet) is how the CIO role differs at a big IT vendor — companies that sell technology — as opposed to companies that buy IT from many vendors. I’m guessing that at HP he won’t be evaluating a ton of Dell hardware; IBM software or Google SaaS products. So stay tuned.
In the meantime, check out Loura’s Structure 2013 session with Box CIO Ben Haines, below. At that time, Haines was making a similar CIO transition from PBR to Box.
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