InformationWeek

October 16, 2000

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IT Management
Tom Thomas Ajuba Solutions

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om Thomas likes to get his managers to show passion for their work. Without passion, the CIO-turned-CEO says, the job may not get done. "People don't perform well if they're not passionate about a thing," says the CEO of Ajuba Solutions Inc., a business-to-business integration company.

Outside of work, sailing is Thomas' passion. He spends 10 days each year in the Caribbean on a 40-foot Beneteau Oceanis Clipper 411 yacht. At work, he uses sailing as a metaphor to get his managers to work as a team. As CIO at Dell Computer from 1993 to 1995 and 3Com from 1995 to 1999, Thomas had his top managers compete against one another in sailing races. He later became a CEO, first at customer-relationship management software vendor Vantive Corp., and this year at Ajuba, where he plans to foster teamwork by pitting two teams of managers in a yacht race. "In sailing, you can't change the wind, but you can adjust the sails," he says. "Similarly in business, you never have control over the market, but you can change your drive, your objectives."

At Dell, Thomas was a key player on a team of executives, including CEO and founder Michael Dell, that changed the PC maker's business model of selling to businesses rather than consumers.

As CIO at 3Com, Thomas teamed with CEO Eric Benhamou and others to create a network control center in 3Com's customer briefing center in Santa Clara, Calif. There, customers saw how products work. "CIOs want to kick tires. They want to see how products operate," he says.

Thomas says his experience as a CIO prepared him to be a CEO because these days, the focus is on business, not technology. "The only important acronym for a CIO is EPS [earnings per share]," he says. "We're trying to drive profitability for shareholders, not the next technology we create."