Ian Takats has spent the past 25 years carving himself a route to the top of the IT industry. Having served as IT director for a number of household names, stepping up for a stint as managing director too, his CV makes for impressive reading.

To make your mark in IT, and move beyond just keeping the lights turned on, you sometimes need to take calculated risks. Takats has certainly done this on a number of occasions. More often than not, he has calculated correctly.

At the international health and fitness chain Holmes Place plc, for instance, Takats decided that the entire access system which visitors used to sign in needed to be pulled out and refreshed.

He says: “We wanted a system which could run from a centralised database at HQ rather than have local installations at each of our 74 clubs throughout Europe. One of the objectives was for the system to instantly validate members’ account status and instantly grant or deny access. Essentially, it was a precursor for what is today used for the Oyster system on the London Underground.

“The danger was, if we got it wrong, people would be queuing half way around the block waiting to get in their club. With a quarter of a million members belonging to the clubs you don’t want any upsets, there's too much competition out there for that, people wouldn't put up with it for long.”

That mixture of tradition and modernity is mirrored once again in Takats' approach to the organisations' IT.  On the modern front, he is a keen advocate of the cloud and has already implemented a private one for his current employer. “We have a global MPLS Network with our applications delivered over Citrix to every one of our 280 employees, in 21 offices around the world,” he says. “That includes sites in the USA, China and Brazil. On top of this, we have a huge virtualised infrastructure. I see this as the natural – and necessary – evolutionary step towards cloud. Once you’ve got a virtualised environment you’re on the right road to move to a fully cloud-based infrastructure and how far you take it is your choice.”

With much of VB & VE's computing now virtualised, Takats now wishes to  “crystallise in [his] mind whether we move to a more hybrid and maybe public cloud.”

Feet on the ground

But let's not get carried away. Keeping a very British dose of guile and traditional business values about him, Takats suggests there is “a certain element of the emperor’s new clothes” about some of the cloud hype. “With some of the collaboration software, there isn’t exactly anything new,” he says. “We've had Microsoft SharePoint “online” for years.”

He also highlights “a big question mark” over return on investment. “It's extremely hard to get a grip on the actual savings you can make because there’s so many hidden costs,” he says. “I don’t think anyone can definitively say that they understand how much everything that they’ve got costs.  The Total Cost of Ownership model is not straight forward when applied to a cloud project. Departmental budgets can also be called into question. For instance, if you make an iPhone App, is that an IT or a marketing expense? It could depend on whether you go outside to get it built or you do it with the IT team in-house. Whichever way, my team will still get called upon to provide at least some support for it, so that's another cost which should be factored in.”

In fact, Takats thinks that one of the blockers to cloud adoption is the “impenetrable cost structures” put forward by some vendors. “Sometimes you need a degree just work them out,” he says. And when looking at online cloud-based office applications, “Google’s pricing structure is good – a flat rate, per user, per month,” he says. “But with others you have to go for the most expensive price structure to make sure you don’t get stung as you decide to use more of their services. This, to me, defies the whole point of cloud.”

Staying on money, Takats has one more barrier blocking his way to the holy grail among the clouds. He has fairly recently been able to secure a lot of investment in his internal infrastructure and now has to sweat his assets a little bit first.

Yet once the finer details are smoothed out, he is sure the cloud presents a pretty compelling business case.
“The ability to fire up virtual servers in seconds is incredibly useful,” he says. “Think how long it used to take to get a server commissioned – you’d have to get the thing delivered, get it out of the box, run through a stack of CDs, press 'next' a few thousand times, get the wires wrong a couple of times, and half the time you'd have to fit a new network card.  Now, you fire it up in a browser and get it in minutes. You tick a couple of a boxes and the thing goes off and provisions itself. And when it comes to customer relationship management systems (CRM), I can't think of any reason why people wouldn't want to host it on the cloud. It just makes sense.”

He says it's now down to him to make a good business case for the cloud to the organisations' directors. He is trained as an accountant so has a good idea about how to go about it. “ But it won’t be in this year’s budget,” he says. “It will be in next year's.”

Crossing over to the dark side

The swingeing public sector cuts which the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government has orchestrated since it came to power in 2010 has left Takats in the unenviable position of having to cut his own team in half over the past year or so. “It's been a tricky time,” he says. “The cloud offers the opportunity to reduce headcount because you no longer need a team of people, armed with screwdrivers, on hand to get inside and physically fix servers. With the pressure we are under to use public money efficiently added to this, We were in the unfortunate position of having to reduce staff numbers.

“I think everyone recognises that IT teams are going to shrink now. My advice to anyone in networking and infrastructure is to find a cloud service provider who is hiring and start working for them – 'going over to the dark side', as I believe it is known.”

However, it's the cloud, if anything, according to Takats, which could make David Cameron's 'big society' work.
“Big society is about people doing things together as a community and social computing and the mass adoption of collaborative cloud based applications enables that. Certainly local councils, which at the moment are all using different platforms and different functionality, could benefit in a big way. Not least in saving money, by utilising each other’s information and expertise through a unified cloud. This could be extended to local businesses which would work with the new Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEP’s) – the organisations that recently replaced the Regional Development Agencies.”

Furthermore, the cloud could also contribute positively to Cameron's affront on bureaucracy. “As a government organisation, we need to adhere to the European procurement process,” explains Takats. “Any purchase above approximately £140,000 has to go through a long-winded and complex tendering process for which any supplier across Europe can bid. It can end up taking six months or longer to buy something, compared with my private sector days when I would have started and finished the project during that time. However, with the cloud providing services on a utility pricing structure with no up-front costs, the costs move from capital to operational expenditure and this could alleviate this problem.”

Advice

Takats says the trick to a successful executive level career in IT comes down to mixture of good man management, effective evaluation of opportunities and, importantly, interviewing well.

“You have to be innovative and put forward new ideas all the time that are sound from a business perspective but you also have to keep the world turning,”  he says. “These days, you almost have to think like a managing director or a CEO – the job has become a lot more strategic. People expect technology to run with almost 100 per cent up time and full functionality now. The trouble is, they think that comes as standard and are not interested in what goes on behind the scenes. To get ahead, you have to show how IT can have a positive influence on the business, beyond the routine day-to-day operations.”

He stressed though, that you shouldn't lose sight of the basics. “You can be as innovative as you like but you still need to be seen as a safe pair of hands,” he warns.

Despite the great power that IT has these days in influencing the ways that organisations do business, IT representation on boards remains low. If this is your ambition, Takats suggests you should be ready to up sticks if needs be. “You have to be able to recognise a glass ceiling,” he says, “or have the courage to jump on an opportunity when one arises. Lots of people get trapped because they are comfortable with their surroundings. But it's no use waiting around for something to happen around you – you have to make things happen for yourself.”

He says IT works in cycles around projects – you'll be madly busy for a stretch and then, once your current project is finished, things can go quiet. “Once you've achieved what you set out to do  in the role, it's time to think about the next challenge,” he says. “Once you’re part of the fabric you stagnate.”

Luckily for Visit Britain and Visit England, the cloud looks like it will keep Takats busy for a good stretch of time yet.