CIO interview: Ravi Malick, Box

As global CIO at tech supplier Box, Ravi Malick wears two hats. The political science graduate runs IT operations at the cloud storage firm and provides his expertise in the supplier’s business operations to help it connect with its CIO customers.

This split is what attracted him to the job, he says. “I am 50% internal, running IT, security and the normal CIO kinds of things, and then I am 50% external, working with our customers, sales teams, product management and marketing, focused on conveying how to best use our products.”

It is not surprising that this job diversity is appealing to Malick, who does not have a typical educational background for a pure technologist. He graduated in political science at Brown University, Rhode Island, in 1996, but says tech has always been part of his life. “I am a technologist. Even as a kid I was a tinkerer, and taught myself Pascal and Basic. It has always been part of anything I have done,” he tells Computer Weekly.

For example, after starting his career in investment banking, Malick used IT to support his work, learning Visual Basic to automate his spreadsheet model. After this stint in investment banking, Malick became a consultant at PwC. This is where he cut his teeth on enterprise IT, doing large implementations.

During this time, he did a 13-week “crash course” in various technologies and system design, and was sent out to work on different PwC projects. His technology interest continued, and he was one of the very first people at PwC to learn Java, in the late 1990s. He also worked on e-commerce implementations during this time.

In the early 2000s, during the first dot com phase, Malick left PwC and entered the startup world, where he held various business roles, including consulting, product management and sales, over a period of several years. He continued to use his technical background in these roles.

“Everything is in the cloud – we were born software as a service and we like to drink our own champagne. With the exception of a few, all our applications are truly SaaS”

Ravi Malick, Box

After working at startups for about 10 years, he joined energy company Vistra Corp, where, as CIO, he became an early adopter of Box technology. In July 2020, about 11 years later, Malick left Vistra and ended up in discussions with Box over the CIO role.

“I ended up taking some time off to reset. In discussions with Box, I wasn’t sure I wanted a pure [internal] CIO role. What enticed me was not only the company and leadership, who I knew well, but also the role being both internal and external.”

Box, which employs about 2,500 staff, mainly in North America, has a team of about 100 IT workers, including Box employees and those from suppliers. “This is very similar to most IT departments, focused on making sure things are running smoothly with operations, applications and end user groups,” says Malick.

While the total IT team at Box is just over 100 people, Malick says he has an entire workforce that works in IT and is tech savvy, which makes things easier.

He says his internal CIO role sees him focusing on three things: how to minimise risk, how to maximise value and how to manage cost.

Box is a supplier that practices what it preaches in terms of operational IT, says Malick. The core applications it uses are Salesforce for customer-facing technology, Workday for people management, and financial systems from NetSuite.

“Everything is in the cloud – we were born software as a service (SaaS) and we like to drink our own champagne,” says Malick. “With the exception of a few, all our applications are truly SaaS. Even those that, for whatever reason, are not, are running on infrastructure as service (IaaS).”