40 CIO Digest January 2010

AMERICAS

The energy crises of the 1970s and 1980s and the ability to extract more high-margin gasoline and jet fuel from each barrel of oil

prompted a number of challenges in the downstream logistics of transporting and trading oil. Once routinely available, ship owners could no longer get good, quality

oil to fuel their ships, as the major oil companies began an exodus from the maritime fuel

market and were replaced by hundreds of local and regional players scattered around the globe. Understandably, this created a logistical nightmare for ship owners.

Enter Paul Stebbins and Michael Kasbar. Recognizing an opportunity, the pair started a privately held company called Trans-Tec with a mere $100,000 in 1985 and never looked back. When

International Recovery, a publicly traded company specializing in trading aviation fuel, acquired Trans-Tec in 1995, the name of the company was changed to World Fuel Services. Stebbins and Kasbar remained with the company and were eventually elevated to lead the company in 2002—Stebbins as CEO and Kasbar as president and COO. Today, the 24-hour, around-the-world, full-service “filling station” provides fuel and services to commercial and corporate aircraft, petroleum distributors, and ships at more than 2,500 locations.

The right executive for the jobTurn the page to early 2007. Rapid growth, including various mergers and acquisitions, had left World Fuel Services with a highly decentralized

Agile GlueThe Logistics of Business and IT

By Patrick E. Spencer

symantec.com/ciodigest 41

IT environment. The executive management team sought a global CIO with experience managing business-critical global trading systems as well as standardizing disparate, silo-based IT infrastructures. But proven technology expertise wasn’t the only criteria; the team wanted an executive who understood the importance of aligning IT with the business—and moreover had repeatedly done so in prior roles. They found the right person for the job in Massoud Sedigh.

As a partner and managing director of Global Technology at Cantor Fitzgerald Securities, Sedigh had overseen an effort to consolidate three disparate development groups located in New York City, Los Angeles, and London into one global team. He subsequently held roles as the Trading CIO for a joint venture between Shell, Texaco, and Saudi Aramco and as CIO and executive vice president at Global Signal, Inc.—both of which required tight integration with the business.

Technology + process fuels resultsThe importance of IT in driving execution and innovation is taken very seriously by Sedigh. “IT should be run as a business,” he contends. “We largely don’t have any assets in our business—and technology plays a huge role, differentiating our pro- duct offerings and giving us a competitive advantage.”

With parallel alignment between IT and the business a paramount concern, his role isn’t restricted to just the IT function; rather, he oversees the Technology and Process team. “We intentionally structured the team this way,” he explains.

Massoud Sedigh, Global CIO, Technology and Process,

World Fuel Services

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History: Founded in 1985Annual Revenue: $18.5 billionIndustry Segments: Aviation, Marine, and LandOffices: 44 Countries: 24Locations: 2,500+Staff: 1,200+Fortune Ranking (2009): 137 Website: www.worldfuel.com

Transportation Logistics: World Fuel Services

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42 CIO Digest January 2010

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Business continuity is a serious concern for World Fuel Services, with headquarters in Miami,

Florida, a frequent path for hurricanes. “Our prior data center environment was located in a building that would withstand a Category Two hurricane,” Sedigh says. “We retained it as our failover site and relocated our primary data center to a bunker that will with-stand up to a Category Five hurricane.”

Virtualization facilitates consolidationConsolidation of the data center environment rose to the forefront for the team as they planned for the data center overhaul. The team heavily leveraged virtualization technologies from VMware as part of this process. “We wanted to utilize existing IT as-sets without acquiring a completely new set of hardware and software technologies,” Sedigh notes. “With the move to a bunker environment, which didn’t have as much space as a traditional data center, our footprint became an important consideration.”

Virtualization efforts began with the servers running Microsoft Windows. “We were able to reduce the server count from more than 80 to 12,” Sedigh reports. “This dramatically reduced our power consumption and provided us with significant flexibility in the move to the bunker environment.”

Storage consolidation also be-came a priority. “We standardized our storage infrastructure on technolo-gies from NetApp,” Sedigh says. This allowed his team to reduce the overall number of storage systems and ar-rays while helping to drive operational efficiencies.

Backup and recovery grows with the businessSymantec technologies have played an important role in helping Sedigh and his team in all of the above—from consolidation, to virtualization, to optimization. Symantec data center technologies aren’t new to World Fuel Services. “We have relied on Veritas NetBackup for backup and recovery for more than a decade,” Sedigh says. NetBackup’s support for heteroge-

neous environments enables World Fuel Services to manage backups across its Linux, Microsoft Windows, and UNIX server platforms with one toolset and console.

And when World Fuel Services standardized its storage infrastruc-ture on NetApp, the tight integration between NetBackup and the NetApp storage systems and arrays helped facilitate rapid migration. “We lever-aged Symantec Consulting Services as part of that migration project,” Sedigh adds.

Similarly, when World Fuel Services implemented its next-generation ERP solution based on Oracle and virtualized its Microsoft Windows-based server environment, NetBackup’s support for Oracle and VMware allowed World Fuel Services to “focus on adding value instead of dedicating staff to work through integration logistics,” according to Sedigh.

Storage management works as advertisedStorage management prior to the transformation of the data center environment consisted of a hodge-podge of different tools for each server platform and operating sys-tem. In addition to lacking a central-ized view, Sedigh indicates this ap-proach “required special knowledge of each tool and consumed valuable staff time.” The World Fuel Services team also sought to move systems from one server platform to another and to streamline storage load bal-ancing across each infrastructure. The team looked at several solu-tions and settled on Veritas Storage Foundation, primarily because it delivers a stable infrastructure and highly available file systems across all of its server platforms. “It simply works as advertised,” Sedigh says.

24×7 availabilityHigh availability is not merely an objective but a business require-ment for World Fuel Services. “We run a 24×7 business,” Sedigh notes.

Data Center Transformation Consolidation, Virtualization, Optimization

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This provides World Fuel Services with the ability to consolidate resources with the end result of driving operational excellence across all business segments and prompting more seamless change management. Sedigh summarizes the role of the team as follows: “We’re the glue that holds the business together and facilitates innovation across the different segments.”

The transformation of the IT organization revolved around three issues: processes, people, and technology. “All three of these are critical,” Sedigh emphasizes. “IT cannot work in a silo.” Integration of IT and the business is maintained by using a model that assigns IT business leads for each business entity. These individuals have the charter to learn that particular business segment as well as—or better than—the actual business owners themselves. “Our internal business partners are my customers,” Sedigh explains. “And we are focused on helping them meet their business goals and requirements.” He argues that he is not merely a technologist but “also a business partner who must look at everything through the lens of the business.”

Reducing total cost of ownership is also a key consideration for nearly every IT initiative. With this in mind, Sedigh instituted various business measurements. “We have a process in place that allows us to evaluate the return on investment for every project,” Sedigh says. As a result, working in concert with the business owners, he and his team retroactively assess the success—or limitations—of a particular IT project and then factor those lessons learned into future initiatives.

Standardization refines the businessThe most pressing issue awaiting Sedigh when he arrived was the design and implementation of a next-generation >Continued on page 43

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“Our Oracle ERP solution must deliver 100 percent availability across all time zones.” He and his team have con-figured all business-critical systems in multi-node clusters using Veritas Cluster Server. He elaborates: “When a problem does occur, we either schedule a failover ahead of scheduled main-tenance windows or quickly migrate over to another node in the cluster with virtually no impact to end users.”

Plotting archiving and e-discoveryBurgeoning email volumes and grow-ing unstructured data stores, coupled with discovery requirements associ-

ated with being a publicly traded company, prompted Sedigh to look at archiving and e-discovery alterna-tives. “Symantec Partner Terremark Worldwide, Inc. worked with the World Fuel Services team to understand our business requirements and to map a solution that met our needs,” Sedigh says. “We’ve been able to lower our storage costs by archiving to less-expensive NetApp storage and using deduplication technologies, as well as improve the performance of our Exchange servers,” he adds.

Benefits extend to the legal staff, which is now able to conduct its own searches instead of relying on Sedigh’s team. They also dramatically

shaved the time required to complete discoveries.

Aggregate becomes greenGreen initiatives are becoming increas-ingly important to World Fuel Services, and the changes made in the data center environment directly feed into this area. Specifically, Sedigh and his team have lowered power consumption by consolidating their total number of serv-ers through virtualization technologies, leveraging multi-node clustering, and optimizing their storage environment through deduplication and other tech-nologies. Overall, the different initiatives spearheaded by Sedigh and his team reduce energy consumption.

Oracle-based ERP system. Rolled out in early 2008, the solution created significant operational efficiencies and business capabilities. For the remainder of 2008, Sedigh and his team spent much of their time stabilizing the solution; this included weekly production releases consisting of more than 20,000 changes to the application and IT infrastructure.

Concurrent with the Oracle ERP implementation, Sedigh began to look at the underlying IT infrastructure. “We needed an IT infrastructure foundation in place before we could truly transform the IT organization,” Sedigh contends. “Reducing our custom footprint would help us to reduce complexity, simplify maintenance, and facilitate timely upgrades.”

Standardization was the primary objective, according to Sedigh. And as part of this process, he and his team reduced the number of technology providers and solutions. “We are now in a position where we can quickly and easily integrate new technology components, including IT assets and business requirements of acquisitions, into our larger IT environment,” he says. “Previously, this was very difficult for us to do.” Indeed, with the prior IT infrastructure, World Fuel Services often acquired businesses and simply kept them as a stand-alone unit because

the company did not have the capability to fold them into the larger business. Sedigh assesses the situation as follows: “I could not add bells and whistles to a house of cards.”

Strategic business agilityGreater business agility is a pivotal benefit of the different initiatives Sedigh and his team have spearheaded. When the

“I could not add bells and whistles to a house of cards.”

– Massoud Sedigh, Global CIO, Technology and Process, World Fuel Services

Massoud Sedigh (front) and his senior management team (left to right): James Smith, Russell Beyer, Edith Olmedo, and Ben Ribaudo.

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44 CIO Digest January 2010

On the security front, standard-

ization provided the World

Fuel Services team with the

means to create efficiencies while

driving down IT risks. “Standardizing

much of our security infrastructure

on Symantec not only gave us an

integrated toolset but a holistic view

of security issues and monitoring,”

Sedigh says.

Centralized endpoint securityFor endpoint security, World Fuel

Services relied on a solution that did

not meet its operational needs. Sedigh

and his team determined that Symantec

Endpoint Protection would help them

address the deficiencies of their prior

endpoint security environment. “Our

implementation was relatively easy.

We accomplished it in about three

months,” Sedigh recalls. In addition

to mitigating IT risk through zero-day

protection, he cites the ability to have

one centralized view of endpoint secu-

rity across all clients and automated

deployment of updates and patches as

key benefits.

Protecting the IPUnlike most companies, World Fuel

Services’ core assets are in its informa-

tion and systems, including source

code and data. “Information is our

business, and a data breach could incur

significant damage to the company’s

reputation and loss in valuable intel-

lectual property,” Sedigh notes. “We

wanted more insight into how confi-

dential and critical data were moving

around within our organization.”

After a lengthy vetting process,

Sedigh and his team selected

Symantec Data Loss Prevention and

rolled it out with the help of Symantec

Consulting Services about 18 months

ago. The solution is used across the

company’s network, endpoints, and

storage systems, and the team uses

the Monitor, Prevent, and Enforce

features.”

With all of the pieces of Data Loss

Prevention in place, Sedigh and his

team are able to discover where criti-

cal information resides and monitor

its use, as well as manage access

and enforce policies. The different

data loss policies were developed in

concert with each business partner,

the risk management team, and legal

department. “We don’t want to spend

time looking in the mirror but to look

ahead as a business,” Sedigh quips.

“We thus spent a significant amount

of time making sure we had developed

a comprehensive list of policies for

everything from discovery and moni-

toring to enforcement.”

Managing security The roll out of the next-generation ERP

solution created a heightened sense

of awareness around compliance for

the World Fuel Services team. “We

essentially had put all of our financial

and operational data and transactions

into the new system,” Sedigh com-

ments. “We subsequently reviewed

all of our policies and processes and

determined that we needed a security

management solution that would allow

us to automate security monitoring and

reporting.” The prior solution the team

had in place was unstable and did not

provide the necessary functionality.

After evaluating several differ-

ent software solutions, they chose to

migrate to Symantec Security Informa-

tion Manager. With implementation

assistance from Symantec Consulting

Services and training from Symantec

Education Services, they were able to

quickly move to the new solution. “IT

staff can focus on risk management

and driving business-critical initiatives,

rather than dealing with unresponsive

systems and escalating product issues

for support,” Sedigh says.

Security and Compliance “Trading In” Risk and Inefficiency

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> Symantec Data Loss Prevention> Symantec Endpoint Protection> Symantec Enterprise Vault> Symantec Security Information

Manager> Veritas Cluster Server> Veritas NetBackup> Veritas Storage Foundation> Symantec Consulting Services> Symantec Education Services> Symantec Enterprise Support Services

Technology Fuel from Symantec

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2008 financial crisis hit, World Fuel Services was well prepared, and Sedigh and his team were able to concentrate on addressing the new business challenges versus day-to-day management of the company’s IT systems. “We instituted real-time reporting of critical credit and collections data for high risk customers,” Sedigh says. This automated process reduced the days to collect by increasing efficiencies and reducing bad debt.

The fuel industry is only as successful as the unbroken chain that crisscrosses its three market segments—upstream, midstream, and downstream. A fracture between any of them results in an energy crisis. On a parallel note, World Fuel Services’ business is only as successful as the linkages that exist within its business. And the Technology and Process team is the glue—an agile compound—linking the different segments of the business together. n

Patrick E. Spencer (Ph.D.) is the editor in chief for CIO Digest and The Confident SMB and the author of a book and vari-ous articles and reviews published by Continuum Books and Sage Publications, among others.

check out the executive Spotlight Podcast with Massoud Sedigh at go.symantec.com/ sedigh-podcast

Podcast

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VideoWatch a video of Massoud Sedigh at go.symantec.com/ sedigh-video