Living local, working global

Cisco's Mike Paranihi leads a global IS team from Auckland

Dossier

Name: Mike Paranihi
Title: Director IS
Organisation: Cisco
Location: Auckland
Favourite restaurant: Sri Panang – Malaysian restaurant on K’Rd [Auckland]. Excellent food, great value for money and always busy – a good sign.
Most recent read: Sacha Baron Cohen: The Unauthorised Biography.
Favourite place to visit in New Zealand: Matai Bay, Karikari Peninsula
Worst job: Twinkie at Turoa. I lasted one week.
First computer: Commodore 64
What keeps you awake at night: My ever-growing list of internal and external stakeholders I need to maintain or develop relationships with.


Why did you choose to come back to New Zealand to live and work?

After having kids overseas, my wife and I wanted to give our kids the same lifestyle that we grew up with here in New Zealand, surrounded by family, schools with grassy fields and the great outdoors. New Zealand has a lot to offer and our lifestyle is amongst the best in the world.

What are the challenges of managing a global team from New Zealand?

Time zones are a challenge. However, you learn to work with the constraints of a globally distributed virtual team. New Zealand gets a lot of time zone overlap with the US, Asia and India. This helps when scheduling conference calls or meetings with colleagues in these regions. Where I suffer the most is connecting with colleagues in Europe.

Regular travel back to HQ is a challenge to my family environment. I used to travel to San Jose between six and eight times a year for meetings like operations reviews. Now we have Cisco Telepresence, I’ve been able to cut my trips down to two to three a year. I prefer to get up for a 5am Telepresence meeting as opposed to a 24-hour return flight to San Jose.

Not being on site at San Jose where my team are involved in some very heavy lifting during major releases is another challenge. During a major release folks may be working through the night to bring critical applications back online and I prefer to be in the trenches with them, rather than attending a Go Live call via the phone.

I understand you changed your name. Why was that?

Rather than change my name, I actually have two legal names. I was known as Mike Morris for 26 years. When I decided to get a work visa to live in the UK I needed to get a birth certificate. Births Deaths & Marriages, in their infinite wisdom, sent back my birth certificate as Mike Paranihi as they told me my Mum and Dad were not married when they had me. They also never registered me at birth, therefore they gave me my mother’s maiden name.

At the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen, I became a new man with two legal names.

I asked them what do I do with my old name and they said, just put on your passport “also known as”. Later, when I got married, my wife Denise had a choice of surnames and she decided on Paranihi. So now I constantly use Mike Paranihi.

Another reason to use Paranihi, was that we also wanted to keep the connection with my Maori heritage for my kids and their children.

How hard was it to convince Cisco that you could do this and still be effective?

Cisco was a different company when I made the move home and we were just making the shift to understanding how effectively a mobile workforce is in terms of skills retention, lowering costs and creation of global talent pools that can effectively help enable innovation and growth. I certainly had to break some ground, however the technology we had then and now is definitely a leveller in terms of making the world flat and connecting people and teams across time zones.

In what ways has technology made this possible?

A typical day for me will mean I’ll start the day at 5am or 6am. The Cisco Virtual Office I have at home means I can conduct meetings from home leveraging all the functionality and capabilities I have at my actual Cisco office. I have an IP Phone that is connected to the Cisco network for voice, I leverage Cisco Webex Conferencing to share presentations live over the web during conference calls and we also leverage Webex to share video live with all meeting participants.

I also use Webex Connect for the instant messaging “tap on the shoulder” with a colleague. The real leveller though is Cisco Telepresence. I am still amazed by the level of quality I am able to conduct meetings with participants halfway round the globe. I tell my team, if you want a face to face meeting with Mike, go see him in Torrey Pines, a Telepresence conference room in San Jose.

What’s top of your mind right now?

Virtualisation. This is a cornerstone strategy for Cisco IT and I am excited by the real benefits we are seeing in our datacentres through the implementation of Cisco products like the Unified Computing System and the Nexus switch combined with Vmware and EMC.

The power consumption savings, cabling cost reductions and unbelievable virtual machine provisioning is a little mind boggling. My team in the US, in partnership with other internal IT colleagues and Cisco Services, are pioneering the implementation of customer facing business services that are housed on our private cloud. Virtualisation is changing the speed with which IT can deliver, as well as providing real cost saving benefits and it is exciting to see.

You sit on a few Cisco corporate board. What role do you play in those?

I primarily represent Cisco IT on these boards based on [my] experience and knowledge and I bring a technology perspective to the discussions and decisions. To be successful though, you need to be able to talk in business terms and bring relevance to what that particular board is empowered to lead.