A Scalable K-12 Education Solution: K12 CEO Ron Packard (Part 1)

Ron Packard was previously a vice president of Knowledge Universe investing, incubating, and operating several charter school companies. Previously, Ron worked for both McKinsey & Company and Goldman Sachs. He holds a B.A. in economics and mechanical engineering (with honors) from the University of California at Berkeley. He holds an M.B.A. (with honors) from the University of Chicago, and he is a chartered financial analyst. Mr. Packard currently serves on the Department of Defense Educational Advisory Committee.

SM: Let’s start with your story. Where are you from?

RP: I grew up in Thousand Oaks, California, which is your typical suburb of Los Angeles. My father was an radar and weapon systems engineer for Hughes Aircraft. >>>

SaaS Talent Management Roundup

In the SaaS talent management space, Taleo is expanding with its acquisition of Worldwide Compensation. SuccessFactors has yet to make such a move, but I had suggested earlier that it could roll up a smaller company like Salary.com. Let’s take a closer look at these two players’ recent performances.  >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Jigsaw Data

Today’s Deal Radar report focuses on a company with a creative business model. Jigsaw Data, a business contact exchange, has been in the spotlight before. Jigsaw sees itself as piecing data together like one would piece together a jigsaw puzzle. The exchange is a collaborative effort; each member contributes to the puzzle which the San Mateo, CA-based company fits together to benefit the member community. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: LiveOffice

LiveOfficeworks with large and small organizations to archive, discover (i.e., search for information in preparation for litigation), and manage their email. It operates under a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model and helps companies to handle an issue in capital expenditure, storage, backup, networks, replication, disaster recovery, upgrades, maintenance, monitoring, and management. Gartner, Inc. recently recognized LiveOffice as the largest provider of outsourced email archiving services in North America. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Nimsoft

Founded in 2002, Nimsoft is a leading provider of service level management (SLM). It develops and sells software to monitor and manage IT systems. In October 2009, the Redwood City, California-based company extended its reach with Unified Monitoring, solutions for virtualized datacenters, hosted and managed services, cloud platforms, and SaaS resources. >>>

Catching Up On Readings: Burger King Goes High-Tech

Narayanan Raman continues with his CIO interviews, but this week he moves away from consulting and talks with Paj Pawal at Burger King. Click on the full article to read this and all of the week’s posts. >>>

CIO Priorities: Burger King

By Guest Author Narayanan Raman

In the previous three articles, I talked to CIOs of IT consulting and IT services organizations. In this article, I shift gears and speak with Raj Rawal, SVP and CIO of Burger King (BK), the second largest fast food hamburger chain in the world. Raj’s challenges, although similar to those of many CIOs in terms of building efficiency and effectiveness in IT operations, are a little different in that his primary focus area is to complete laying out the fundamental IT foundation at BK. >>>

Leading Corporate Innovation: HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee (Part 3)

SM: Can you give me a sense of the process you use to choose the areas of your research?

PB: I can tell you a bit about the new way that we are running HP Labs. My vision and decision was to focus on 20 to 30 big-bet projects that would really make a difference to HP. The common thread is that the research must satisfy twin goals. >>>