D&B has a press release announcing their new CTO, Mike Manos.
Manos brings more than 25 years of industry experience and deep technological insight to Dun & Bradstreet. He has a proven track record of modernizing and scaling existing platforms for companies such as AOL Services, Nokia and most recently Fiserv, while simultaneously working with product teams to leverage the industry’s latest technologies to develop new solutions. Manos’ passion for solving the most complex problems for clients of all sizes will deliver immediate value to Dun & Bradstreet as he leads the company through the next chapter of technological innovation to enable the rapid growth and delivery of products, services and data-driven insights.
What was kind of surprising is D&B did not mention Mike’s work at Microsoft as he was the person who built the original data center team for Azure. Mike left Microsoft in Apr 2009 and I remember that time well as Mike asked me to drop by his office to have a chat and he shared that he was going to leave Microsoft and he wanted to know what I thought. Given the situation I agreed the best move was for Mike to leave Microsoft. Reflecting back on that time, there was a huge missed opportunity for Microsoft. Within a short period of time Mike’s manager left the company and the VP above as well. If Mike had stayed and moved up the chain he would continue with building a great team.
Mike’s ability to build a great team is what has made him a success and what enables his skills as CTO. The data center group thinks of Mike as a data center person with skills in electrical, mechanical, and sites, but what few know is Mike has a computer science background. Which is why Mike had so much fun in our discussions over the years. I was so lucky to get introduced to Mike by friends at OSIsoft who knew Mike and said I should have breakfast with Mike. We hit it off immediately and have been friends since.
One of the key things Mike pointed out is the IP of the DC group was in the integration work. The individual technologies and components is what almost everyone focuses on in a technical tour. Picking gear is not the hard part. It is figuring out how to make the system work. How do the components work together. This big picture thinking is what makes Mike a great CTO and Microsoft missed out not having Mike stay at the company for the last 12 years and work in system engineering issues of Azure infrastructure. Mike would be looking at AI, ML, IOT, Modeling, Graph Theory, Network Theory in the data center.
Mike is a system thinker. He looks at the big picture and gets the hardware, software, networking, and anything else that involves solving the problem in the big picture. Examples of Mike’s work can be seen in the patents he has been awarded that you can find here. Here is one patent that is solely awarded to Mike.
Data center programming and application distribution interface
Publication number: 20090307094
Abstract: An exemplary data center interface for distributing and monitoring Web applications includes a specification that specifies a call statement to distribute one or more components of a Web application to one or more data centers and a call statement to report metrics associated with performance of the Web application. An exemplary data center interface for associating advertisements with distributed Web applications includes a specification that specifies a call statement and one or more call statement parameters to associate an advertisement with one or more distributed Web applications based on at least one criterion. Various other devices, systems and methods are also described.
Type: Application
Filed: June 4, 2008
Publication date: December 10, 2009
Applicant: Microsoft Corporation
Inventor: Michael J. Manos
I think if Mike was still at Microsoft and had the equivalent of CTO role for Azure infrastructure he could have easily saved the company over a billion dollars. There has been hundreds of people of focused on cost savings in Azure, but all too often the work is like whack a mole as cost savings all too often just trigger another cost overage somewhere else. And finance keeps wondering when they add it all up the overall costs are not coming down the way they thought.
The other day chatting with a data center executive and we were discussing who the really smart good people are in the industry and we shared our short list. The one we both completely forgot to list is Mike Manos as he has moved on to more than the data center industry, but that does not mean he forgot what a good team looks like to run data center infrastructure. Mike is one of rare data center people who has grown his knowledge to be bigger than the data center building.
