Meyer's Innovation Pipeline Pushes New Technologies Across State Street

Innovator: Madge Meyer, chief innovation officer, State Street

Recent Innovations: Cloud computing initiatives, an Innovation Lab in which new technologies are tested

Why They Matter: Cloud computing brings efficiency and ease of provisioning; the lab's useful for new ideas

What's Next: Chip-based security

 

If you need an energy boost or a mood lift, you could do worse than to call Madge Meyer, State Street's new chief innovation officer. The first time I met Meyer, she was managing IT infrastructure and more than 900 IT employees for State Street. Then, and in every conversation since then, Meyer has exuded a high-wattage zest for her job that one seldom sees.

"I'm having so much fun in my new job!" says Meyer, who became chief innovation officer in February of this year. "My boss said, would you like to try something new? I said, absolutely, sign me up." In Meyer's new role, she seeks out and tests new technologies, to see which ones belong at State Street.

 

State Street's Innovation Lab

Meyer has created an Innovation Pipeline at State Street during the last twelve months, which she describes as a three-year blueprint that sketches out what the bank wants to do in every area, including mainframes, storage, security, desktops, middleware and networks. "Within that, we have an innovation lab and a process for bringing new ideas, new products, software and hardware into the lab," she says.

Physically, the lab is one large room filled with new equipment, such as the IBM Enterprise Z mainframe. "We put an open Linux app on the Z series, she says. "It's one processor at 1200 mips, it's unbelievable speed on a 5.2 gig machine. It happens to reduce our software cost, because using one processor and one license you can run a lot of workload. We have 270 images on the Z series already and it's working really well."

IBM says its newest Z series mainframes can be used to provide internal cloud computing because of their ability to handle different types of workloads (x86, Power and Linux) in one refrigerator-sized box. "I think the mainframe is a cloud," Meyer responds. "If you think about it, the mainframe is highly virtualized."

Also in State Street's innovation lab today: several new storage products that come with automatic provisioning. [Meyer declined to share which products are being tested.] "Storage grows about 70% year after year," she says. "However, we've been using data deduplication, which reduces storage needs by about 50%, so the actual hardware growth is about 35%, because we've reduced the amount of physical hardware in our mostly virtualized environment." New storage units automatically balance data as well as provision it, Meyer relates. "We used to have people sitting there entering commands to provision storage," she says. "These days you can just install it and it's automatically recognized by the system. It's much better." Such automation is critical because IT HR costs are rising. "If we have more automation, then we don't have to increase staff when we grow," she says. "Hopefully our staffing will be flat."

 

Early To The Cloud

State Street is a cloud computing early adopter, Meyer notes, beginning with a heavy push on virtualization within the Innovation Pipeline. "Virtualization is the foundation for cloud computing," she notes. To date, all servers have been virtualized and most storage units have as well. Overall, the IT infrastructure is about 65-72% virtualized, she says. "We're aggressively moving toward cloud computing," she says. "We were the earliest adopter of [IBM's] Cloudburst, to get us prepared for cloud computing. Users can provision their own servers for development, and they can give them up when they no longer need them." State Street built its own private cloud internally. The bank is currently migrating some applications over to its cloud and testing them over the summer. "It's also part of green initiative because it uses a lot less energy and connectivity than an unvirtualized environment," Meyer notes.

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