This is the first of what we hope will be a series of podcasts with CIOs who've instigated work to improve IT-business alignment in their organisations. The interview is with New Zealand-resident Peter Burggraaff, until recently the CIO of NZ retail chain Farmers Trading Company. Peter talks to us in this 31'34" podcast episode about his initiative at Farmers and the outcomes he achieved.

In the podcast Peter explains that Farmers was in a situation where IT cost was way too high, and although the IT organisation was doing some things well (particularly managing operational services) it wasn't seen as a real contributor of business value as Farmers looked to put some big business changes in place. He goes on to explain how he started to turn this situation around and built a solid and trusted relationship with Farmers business management.

This podcast came about following the work we did last year on our Technology Garden book (out in April), and as mentioned above we hope to be doing more of these over the coming weeks and months. Thanks Peter!

If you'd like to get involved in this programme of podcasts don't hesitate to let us know.

We interviewed David yesterday and asked him our standard questions. Considering it was the first interview, we think it went OK...

There were a couple of interesting things to come out of the interview:

1. Cape Clear markets itself as an ESB vendor, but its view of what is "in" an ESB is much broader than that of most other vendors - David in particular calls out BPEL-based service orchestration
2. the sweet spot for the company is really a "mainstream", "mid-market" company which may not have much in the way of deep in-house web services or SOA technology skills
3. the company is currently working quite a lot in software-as-a-service (SaaS) and other commercial service delivery scenarios - helping companies in the digital service delivery business create more sophisticated and valuable services
4. David also specifically calls out the need for potential SOA "customers" to make clear distinctions between management of SOA-related technology, and management of the automated processes supported by that technology. These are two separate problems with different solution needs, and they should be evaluated as such
5. it's pretty obvious from the conversation, we think, that Cape Clear is very firmly a technology company selling its capability as a standards-based middleware solution to integration problems. This makes it quite different from many of the other SOA players, which position themselves almost as business change agents.