Dan Farber: Brian thanks for joining me.
Brian Shield: Thank you for having me here today.
Dan Farber: Now The Weather Channel is a big operation that covers the web, mobile, television, satellite, cable--what is the scope of your responsibilities and for technology across all those different parts?
Brian Shield: Sure, so my responsibilities are fairly unique. They span everything from traditional IT operations to broadcast engineering to systems development to the project management office as well as meteorology. Weather systems for us are really the heart and soul of what we do here at The Weather Channel.
Dan Farber: Brian, it seems that we’re in an age in which the web and mobile and satellite and cable television are all converging in some way and becoming more interactive. So what’s the strategy for The Weather Channel around this convergence and interactivity?
Brian Shield: So the question of convergence and interactivity being at the heart of some of that is really one of the most important things that kind of drives what we do. We have written applications against literally dozens, or more than a dozen, different platforms in my tenure here at The Weather Channel. I feel like we are finally at the stage where interactive TV is going to be a reality. We are really excited because we believe with convergence it’s going to become more and more about the consumer, about you. How do you consume weather? Whether it’s information that you consume on the television set, on the web site, on your desktop—a PC or Mac, if you will—or in your car or other kinds of things. What we really want to be able to do is have a personal experience.
Dan Farber: You have been talking about being on all those platforms, from a software development point of view, what are some of the challenges to be being such a multi-platform play?
Brian Shield: One of the biggest challenges in multi-platform for us, if you can imagine weather, is weather is highly perishable so there is obviously an inherent challenge in how do you essentially make this very timely, perishable content available to consumers across a broad range of platforms. So we’ve really spent a lot of time over the years really refining our engine. How do we essentially deliver five minute radar so by the time it arrives on your mobile device or web platform that it’s as timely as possible, and doesn’t tell you about the storm that just passed your location? So part of it is an effort to be extremely timely in how we deliver content, as well as insuring that some of the tools that we are using allow us to get optimum performance. From a web environment, for example, we leverage open source technology quite significantly here in our company. We’re really proud of using the website as an example, where literally today--given the scale of our website, which often times is somewhere between ten to twenty in terms of website size in the world--virtually all of that is an open source platform.
Dan Farber: Let’s talk about a little bit about that open source platform. What are the foundations of that platform perhaps you can get into a little bit about why you are such an advocate for open source?
Brian Shield: Sure. Well let me start at a little bit at the beginning. Open source technology has really been one of the major underpinnings as a company for really almost ten years now. So we were fortunate in that the owners of The Weather Channel, the Baton family and Landmark Communications, really embraced open source technology. Frank Baton was one of the original investors and advocates with Red Hat and that really drove a certain cultural change within our company to really look at open source as a viable option to commercial software. So for the last ten years we treat open source software and various options available to us as really viable possibilities as we consider what software solutions are most appropriate to solve our problems.
Dan Farber: It sounds as if you have been a guinea pig over the years for open source in many ways, because if you look back ten years, not a lot of people were betting the farm on open source infrastructure.
Brian Shield: I think we were early adopters. I think in certain cases we might have been a little bit guinea pigs. But I think were strategic in how we leveraged open source technology. Even today for companies that perhaps haven’t made the investment in open source technology like we have, you obviously don’t start with the most mission critical systems. So we kind of built up certain expertise and core competencies in leveraging some of these capabilities. Over time we’ve kind of gone from a lot of operational systems and monitoring management, to traditional OS’s for some of our major servers, to databases, to software development environments, to really kind of today where we differentiate very little between what systems are predicated on open source and which ones are predicated on commercial software.
Dan Farber: On the data center side, many companies we talk are talking about going more green and virtualization and consolidation. What’s the status of your data centers?
Brian Shield: Sure, great question. I believe that every few years companies need something that kind of stimulates them to change if you will, if it’s not sort of inherent in their culture. For us we found HD has been really been a great boom in that area. What it also forced us to do is, in some cases, almost double the size of our data centers in order to support a lot of the new technology that’s necessary to drive HD. Some of that has really allowed us to do a much more efficient job of measuring and monitoring power usage and things like that. Our HD studio, for example, is LEED certified. That, from the outset, was a very important attribute for us to ensure that we are basically culturally being very sensitive to what we really expouse is really important to our consumers. We feel really good about that part of our--from a data center point of view, power management obviously is an increasingly important portion of our responsibilities. I literally just came back from an event a few moments ago, half an hour ago, where the subject was about green data centers, believe it or not. For us, I won’t say that we’re at the leading edge right now. I think we’re one of those kinds of companies that’s in transition. Like a lot of CIOs’, I look at power management a year or two ago it was almost completely in the confines of the facility’s departments. Today we look at that as sort of an opportunity, both to save money, frankly, and secondly, to be socially responsible. That will be a next critical important part of what we do in terms in how we basically reduce that footprint. Virtualization is one way we are doing it. We are also sensitive to power management needs of our various servers. Not just reducing the foot print--trying to develop standards, trying to insure some of the servers we are using are as efficient as humanly possible. So those are some of the kinds of characteristics that we are thinking about as we move forward.
Dan Farber: Finally let me ask you about weather forecasting, because that’s what The Weather Channel does, to some degree. When is weather forecasting going to become more accurate?
Brian: Well, I would like to think that it already is getting accurate. You will see continued improvements in that area. I happen to have the weather systems or meteorological organization under my area of responsibility. It’s interesting--when I first came here my experiences with meteorology were very few. We really have, I’d like to think, transformed a lot of the meteorology from an art form to a science. Today, for example, when we look at some of our technology, we can have separate data points for 1.9 million points in the continental United States. So literally you cannot go more than a mile without us having a separate data point for those locations. The granularity is increasing dramatically. The number of models we leverage to continue to refine the accuracy with which we create forecasts continues to improve as well. I’m actually very bullish on the quality of that information and I think, frankly, going back to convergence, as convergence becomes more commonplace, I think people will really start to see the benefits of that.
Dan Farber: Well Brian, thanks so much for speaking with me
Brian Shield: I appreciate it. Thank you for your time.
Dan Farber: I have been speaking with Brian Shield who is the Executive Vice President and CIO of The Weather Channel. For CIO Sessions, I’m Dan Farber. Thanks for watching.
