IT Life: Importing Ideas

Iain Chidgey has spent the last 20 years zooming across the Atlantic, helping Silicon Valley start-ups grow their business in Europe. He was part of the team that developed ArcSight into a multimillion dollar company sold to HP in 2010, before becoming the VP and general manager for EMEA at database virtualisation specialist Delphix.

We talked to Chidgey about the decline of the relational database and the excitement of working for a young company.

Building bridges

What’s the favourite IT project that you’ve ever worked on?
In 1995 I was living and working in Silicon Valley. Netscape went public that year and the new buzz was IPO. I joined my first start-up in 1996 as the 25th employee. At the start of the Internet boom, I was providing IT solutions for the newly forming internet service providers. It doesn’t get much more exciting than that.

What technologies were you involved with ten years ago?
After riding the Internet wave, people were looking for the next big thing. At that time I joined my second start-up, ArcSight, which focused on the emerging cyber security market.

What tech do you expect to be involved with in ten years’ time?
Looking forward, there is certainly a buzz around “Big Data” but let’s not forget that a lot of our information is still locked in out-of-date relational technology. The search to discover the replacement for the relational database is well and truly on, but unlocking everything and allowing seamless access and manipulation of historic and modern, structured and unstructured data sets seems like an interesting problem to solve.

What do you think is the greatest challenge for an IT company or department today?
The biggest challenge is deciding when, on the adoption curve, to embrace new technologies and seeing how they would pivot the organisation to work in a way that maximises the benefits and efficiencies of these technologies.

To cloud or nor to cloud?
We see unmistakable evidence of the inevitable.

Who is your tech hero and who is your tech villain?
I cut my teeth in IT when the battle for domination of the software world was being fought between Ellison and Gates. I will allow the reader to decide who was the hero and who was the villain.

What’s your favourite device ever made and what do you use the most?
The phone. In “tech years” it is almost prehistoric, however it manages to evolve with each new technology era.

Apart from your own, which company do you admire the most and why?
I admire the way Apple has turned itself from a niche computer vendor into one of the world’s largest consumer electronics companies.

What did you want to be when you were a child?
Like most young boys I wanted to be an astronaut… and to think the space shuttle only had 500kb of memory.

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