Winner: Wall Street's IT innovator

John McKinley led Merrill Lynch through difficult times, using innovative technology to realize business goals

“We wanted to focus on next stages of growth for Merrill Lynch, and that was in our retail brokering initiative, our private brokerage market, and global foreign exchange business,” McKinley says. “These were the opportunities that represented the next stage of growth for Merrill Lynch.”

Circumstances forced McKinley to think as a business strategist as much as a technologist. “He was making business management decisions,” says John Jordan, principal in the office of the CTO at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young.

“[McKinley] asked himself what were the best products that were going to take him where he wanted top go. He opted out of the old technology, based on being the fastest or having the cost features,” Jordan says. “But instead he went for technology with the total cost of ownership to standardize on hardware where possible.”

Forty-five year-old McKinley may have developed the ability to use technology to further business strategies while at GE Capital. There he managed technology for 27 divisions of the company before leaving to join Merrill Lynch in 1998.

“John [McKinley] had to be smart enough and broad-thinking enough to understand all those businesses,” says Bill Krivoshik, CIO of global investment management at Citibank and a former colleague of McKinley’s at GE. “But he was also a good change agent, fashioning the technology needs to the business.”

Necessity, mother of invention

McKinley latched on to the promise of Linux and Web services to maintain Merrill Lynch’s technology infrastructure and to save resources for special projects.

“Linux and Web services are like blades in our Swiss Army Knife of technology for reorganizing infrastructure,” McKinley explains. He says he is "passionate about Linux because it’s a technology not owned by any one vendor. And I love it for its competitive dynamic.”

McKinley says Linux adoption fit naturally with his plans to migrate from proprietary hardware to Intel servers, because Linux is inexpensive and easily integrated. “We used Linux from front office trading systems all the way through to electronic statements and distributions in our 401K programs documents. It runs our capitol markets front office and the back office for statement generation and distribution."

One of the advantages of Linux is its ability to scale up or down, McKinley says. “You can get a functional Linux system to run on less than 150K of memory. Yet at the same time you see Linux clusters handling over 136,000 transactions per minute,” McKinley says. “That’s powerful stuff. You can use Linux for electronic scanners or in high volume environments. It needs to be on everybody’s radar screen.”

McKinley also sent a strong signal at Merrill Lynch that Web services would be given priority consideration whenever possible when developing in-house programs.

“Last year we put in infrastructure that exposed our legacy mainframe environment as a platform of Web services to our developers. The productivity gains have been huge,” McKinley says. “One program that before implementation was estimated at $800,000 ultimately cost just $30,000 using Web services.”