Ashish Kumar finds customers' survival in new technologies

To Ashish Kumar, it’s all about eating his own dog food. As CTO of Avanade, the joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft that offers systems integration, he realizes that no customer wants to be the first to use a technology, so his company must.

But 2003 was more about helping customers survive than paving the way with new technologies. “We saved our customers $100 million just in server consolidation,” Kumar explains. “It wasn’t so much the hardware cost but the cost of management.”

Kumar encouraged customers to rein in their spending by also deploying Web services instead of more costly application-integration solutions.

For Kumar, being a CTO is as much about balancing communication as it is about balancing budgets. “You need technical credibility with engineers, but you can’t talk over the head of the executives,” he says.