What Happened?
Hawthorne, CA-based Space Exploration Technologies has Appointed Ken Venner as Chief Information Officer
About the Company
SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches the world`s most advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk to revolutionize space transportation, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary. SpaceX has gained worldwide attention for a series of historic milestones. It is the only private company ever to return a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit, which it first accomplished in December 2010. The company made history again in May 2012 when its Dragon spacecraft attached to the International Space Station, exchanged cargo payloads, and returned safely to Earth — a technically challenging feat previously accomplished only by governments. Since then Dragon has delivered cargo to and from the space station multiple times, providing regular cargo resupply missions for NASA.
About the Person
Ken Venner joined SpaceX in January 2012 as Chief Information Officer (CIO). Ken’s focus is to deliver Information Systems and Technology services that are “Like Air”, enabling SpaceX’s engineers and scientists to propel mankind forward as a multi-planetary species. The challenge is to provide cost effective, high-performance and “always on” tools and business processes that enable the business to achieve this goal. Supporting a business comprised of rocket scientists and engineers, full-scale, USA-based manufacturing and a mission-critical launch/mission control team creates unique challenges for an IT organization in terms of design, deployment and support. The SpaceX team expects and demands the IT infrastructure be invisible to them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In addition, Venner’s organization is challenged to design and deploy capabilities with a 99.9% up time (planned and unplanned). Prior to SpaceX, Ken was EVP of Corporate Services and Chief Information Officer at Broadcom Corporation from 2000-2011. During his time at Broadcom, Venner’s team enabled a demanding group of electrical engineers to scale the company from $400M to $7.6B, from 1,000 employees to 10,000, from 5 locations to 80+ locations world-wide and successfully acquired and integrated 50+ other companies. It was a time of massive, cost effective scale; Venner’s team drove to create reliable, repeatable, scalable and maintainable platforms through technology implementation and process design. This is where Ken realized the need for IS/IT services that are “Like Air”. Prior to Broadcom, Venner was VP of Product Management and CIO for Rockwell Electronic Commerce from 1997-2000. Before joining Rockwell, Venner worked at Lucent Technologies/AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1986-1997.
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