by Emily Sopensky

To honor the stellar performances of IT leadership in Austin, the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) hosted the first Austin IT Executive Awards reception at the 1998 Austin ITEC Expo in December.

A committee of five judges chose Jerry Gregoire, Dell VP and CIO, as the Austin IT Executive of the Year. He is responsible for Dell's information systems worldwide. The other two finalists were Steve Cox, CIO of VTEL Corporation, and Carolyn Purcell, executive director of the Texas Department of Information Resources.

Gregoire won primarily for implementing the "Run Dell on Dell" strategy. The goal is to run Dell's key business processes on Dell's own self-developed technology products. It is an evolutionary strategy that allows Dell to deliver business value in an incremental fashion, versus the "big bang" approach of building one behemoth to be launched once only.

Gregoire is considered a gifted strategist and visionary. Because he is constantly looking for new opportunities and new technology to be used in the factories as well as the sales and service areas, many also consider Gregoire to be the chief technologist at Dell.

Prior to joining Dell in July 1996, Gregoire spent 10 years with PepsiCo Inc., most recently as VP of information systems for Pepsi-Cola Company.

Special Award to DejaNews

In a special award, the judging committee also recognized Steve Madere, DejaNews founder and chief technology officer, as the Austin Information Technologist of the Year. One of the Austin software community's brightest innovators, Madere works with a team of 50 developers to build and maintain the leading Usenet search engine and one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Web. Approximately 3.5 million persons participate in discussions on DejaNews each month, generating over 130 million page views. Madere's powerful engine is capable of accurately searching a 450 GB full-text database within 2-3 seconds. Even as 1 GB of new text is added each day -- in 17 languages including English -- to the DejaNews archive, users still experience the excellent performance.

Popular DejaNews products include My DejaNews, a personalized Web-based Usenet newsreader that allows individuals to seek and post to various Usenet newsgroups. DejaNews licenses its technology to many of the largest sites on the Web, including America Online, AT&T WorldNet Service, Bell South, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, InfoSpace, Lycos, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, The Microsoft Network, Open Text, WebCrawler, Yahoo!, and ZDNet.

Judges were Joe Levy, CIO magazine; Jimmy Treybig, founder and former president and CEO of Tandem Computers, now of Austin Ventures; Dr. Marcos Sivitanides, Southwest Texas State University; Mike Hill, Ernst & Young managing auditor; Bob Fabbio, chairman of the board, Dazel Corporation and general manager, TL Ventures.

# # #

Published in Texas Software News, January 1999

Home | Corporate Communications | Newsletters | Technical Documentation | Reporting | Contact Us