The 2013 Tech 50: Christopher Perretta

State Street Corp. is in the final year of a four-year conversion to a cloud computing infrastructure — a bold departure from the past that is already paying dividends. The asset servicer breaks out the pretax savings from its Business Operations and Information Technology Transformation program: $198 million through 2012 (on a total expense base of $6.9 billion) and a projected $220 million in 2013. It is far more than a cost breakthrough, says executive vice president and CIO Christopher Perretta; it puts the Boston-based company, which has $25.4 trillion in assets under custody and administration and $2.2 trillion under management, on the road from “automation to digitization.” That means “describing the business in a digital way so you can very rapidly configure new services through the cloud rather than custom-building them from scratch as under the old model,” explains Perretta, 55, who was CIO of General Electric Commercial Finance before joining State Street in 2007. Figuring in State Street’s IT plans are new ways of manipulating and delivering data and shoring up data security and integrity. Perretta is keeping an eye on advances in data visualization and the “consumerization of IT.” He notes: “People’s expectations of technology have changed. They’re used to cool stuff at home, so they want cool stuff at work.”