BL: We don't have a shrinking budget because we are a fast-growing company. For instance, we recently finished implementing a five-digit global dialing telephony system in the US based on our own infrastructure, Cisco technologies, and zip trunking. We will roll this out in Asia next year. That's an inexpensive investment, but it will improve our global communications.

We are also re-engineering 78 internal processes to make them global and scalable, and plan to roll them out over the next 12 months. This is a huge investment.

CWHK: What is the most challenging and interesting project you have ever been involved in your career?

BL: There is more than one. At Silicon Graphics, I participated in building the headquarters from scratch--it's now the Googleplex [Google's headquarters in Mountain View]. My responsibilities included voice, video, networking, and making the headquarters ready to support up to 3,000 people with high bandwidth. That was a beautiful campus.

At the same company, I also had an insane but life-changing experience of implementing Oracle applications in 30 countries in six months. At Equinix, a few months after I joined the company, I was involved in building the global development center in Singapore from scratch in a few months.