IT Life: Hailing Taxis By App

Rorie Devine is chief technology officer at Hailo, the British mobile app that matches tax drivers and passengers. He says his speciality is “loosely coupled people and technology architectures”.

What has been your favourite project so far?
I can honestly say that one of the projects we’ve just finished (Hailo 2.0) has been my favourite. “2.0″ projects can be a graveyard for ambition but we really nailed this one. We created a global, scalable and cost effective platform for Hailo to power our phenomenal growth in a really agile way. We can now launch our services anywhere in the world without writing any software.

Looking back at Oracle

What tech were you involved with ten years ago?
Ten years ago I was at Betfair pushing boundaries in online transaction processing. We were running one of the five hottest Oracle databases in the world and having a lot of fun.

What tech do you expect to be using in ten years’ time?
I think how we interact with technology will totally change in the next ten years. One day we’ll look back and laugh at the days when we all used to stare at a little rectangular box we held in our hand.

Who’s your tech hero?
Scott McNealy the founder of Sun Microsystems. Sun were the Google of their day and the first company to deliver ground breaking technology from within a really progressive company culture. I don’t think it’s coincidence that Eric Schmidt (ex CEO Google) was CTO at Sun. I met Scott once, he was just as impressive in real  life as you would imagine.

Who’s your tech villain?
Whoever led the Windows 8 project for Microsoft. Windows 8 is arguably the worst major operating system ever inflicted on a world that had done nothing to deserve it.

What’s your favourite technology ever made? Which do you use most?
My smartphone (see comment above about staring at a little handheld box), I flip-flop between iOS and Android and currently have an iPhone.

What is your budget outlook going forward? Flat? Growing?
Growing.

Apart from your own, which company do you admire most and why?
It has to be Google. I think Google will go down as the most important technology company in history. It’s not just the breadth and depth of their innovation that is so impressive..it’s also their principles and how they approach business. Their creation, advocacy and use of open systems/platforms is a so refreshing compared with the “walled garden” approach other companies create.

Meeting expectations

What’s the greatest challenge for an IT company/department today?
The velocity and volatility in technology is rising seemingly exponentially. The expectations of what we could/should be able to do are also rising at the same time as expectations of how long things should take to do are shrinking. It only makes it more fun when you deliver though.

To Cloud or not to Cloud?
Cloud definitely. If you are still running your own data centres stop it now and concentrate on delivering your business plan.

What did you want to be when you were a child?
I wanted to be an architect when I was very young but it was love at first sight when I saw my first computer.

What do you know about Transport Technology?