In the normal course of events, being a CEO usually means you hobnob with other CEOs, sit on boards and the like.
If you have expertise in an area, you often want to be associated with others in similar but not competitive fields.
In technology, there is a lot of cross-fertilization that occurs at the board level. While not quite the Japanese Keiretsu model, there are a lot of similar relationships that stem from boards of directors.
So, I was really intrigued by the announcement that Sam Gilliland of Sabre has joined the board of Rackspace.
What has been rather interesting is to question whether or not this is a conflict of direction for Sabre’s CEO. Why?
It is probably worth looking this through the prism of the wider, travel distribution marketplace.
Sabre is one of the three gatekeepers of the closed world of GDS distribution (the other two being Amadeus and Travelport)
It has done a great job over the years in building and then maintaining a secure and restricted marketplace for travel products.
The internet, of course, represents a somewhat different – one could even say anarchic – view of marketplaces. Sabre decided many years ago that owning the physical infrastructure of computing was a commodity and it outsourced its Tulsa data centre (nicknamed the bunker) to HP (formerly EDS).
However, there are a vast number of specialized systems, many on TPF, that still reside in this infrastructure. Sabre also supports a number of the now misnamed Unix type "open systems" in the same location.
From Rackspace’s own website, and the release announcing the appointment of Sam Gilliland to the board:
"Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud platform. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing."
The world is rushing headlong into cloud computing, and away from centrally managed infrastructure.
Cloud computing represents a more efficient use of scarce computing power allowing more standardization at the infrastructure level.
It is also opening up systems so that apps and other user-developed services can be easily adopted at very low cost.
In effect, cloud computing is to industry what democracy was to government.
The adoption of cloud computing is natural for travel - and airlines, in particular, which represent a vast array of users and stakeholders.
Like many markets, it has a relatively small supply footprint and a large consumer footprint combined with a few layers of aggregators. On the web, aggregators are fine. Controlling gatekeepers are not.
So the interesting thing is that here is the CEO of one of the world’s largest gatekeeper companies in travel is joining the board of one of the leading proponents of open cloud based non-gatekeeper infrastructure.
Is Gilliland trying to tell us something?