CIO Straight Talk - Get Your IT Budget to 1 Percent of Revenue

As a semiconductor company, Avago has thin margins, and the market changes from one year to the next. Our IT cost structure has to be flexible enough to go up and down with revenue, but with traditional IT, your costs don't flex.

We were fortunate to have the opportunity to build IT from the ground up when Avago was spun out from Agilent, in 2005. First we outsourced the whole infrastructure and all of our applications. That gave us flexibility and scalability. But our CEO set some extremely tough goals for lowering the IT budget. That's when we began to get serious about moving applications to the cloud.