meet me room
WARD WILLIAMS – PROLABS
Ward Williams joined ProLabs in January 2014 as CCO, and was promoted to the role of CEO in April
2016. Ward was previously vice president of global sales and marketing for the datacomm business unit of
TE Connectivity and also worked with network infrastructure equipment.
Does your college/university
education have any specific
relevance to the career you
have now?
I would say that my college
experience gave me something far
more valuable than the knowledge
learned through the lectures
and coursework. Experiencing
the multi-cultural environment
and entrepreneurial spirit of California
and Silicon Valley in the early
1990s gave me such confidence
in my ability to shape my own
destiny. The Valley was beginning
to explode with creative energy,
and the best and the brightest from
Asia, India, and frankly all over the
world were my classmates. Just by
being around them and studying with
them I was able to learn first hand
the traits and best practices that I
would ultimately try to emulate and
adopt in my career.
What are the biggest
changes you have seen in
the data centre industry?
I have been watching the open
compute project for some time now,
as it is a fascinating re-do of the open
source paradigm that caused such a
stir in the Windows vs Linux OS battle
around the year 2000. Having been
right in the middle of that skirmish
while working on a tablet PC (this is
so long before iPads we didn’t even
have a cool name for the category),
for me personally it is very interesting
to see the same market forces at
work. Just as before, old established
expensive brands are fighting to
keep the status quo, with end users
attracted by the promise of saving
money with an open source solution,
but ultimately still needing the same
level of support and quality.
Are there any changes in
laws or regulations that you
would like to see that you
think would make your job
easier?
I think one of the biggest challenges
for a global company in growth
mode that is expanding in multiple
regions is managing the complex
problem of international tax. In my
opinion corporate tax in itself should
not dictate your business strategy,
your growth should follow the logical
path to the largest profit pools.
Unfortunately the reality is that one
big challenge is just knowing what
the rules are and avoiding ending up
at a strategic disadvantage due to an
unfair playing field. When you go one
step further and consider the diverse
franchise tax laws in the US, with 50
different interpretations of corporate
tax, it becomes very complex – we
just want to make a great product and
make a decent profit while solving
our customers problems, not worry
about these issues.
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