Introducing Santa - businessman and technology visionary

Santa Claus isn't just a business leader of global renown, he's been considered a technology visionary ever since taking delivery of his first IBM System/360 mainframe in the 1970s, when he developed the ground-breaking good/bad database

Back in the good old days, before the Reformation, Santa enjoyed a fairly sedate working year: children's Christmas expectations were much lower and could be easily satisfied with a wooden model knight splashed with some leaded paint, a handful of nuts and maybe a quince or two.

These demands were trivially easy to satisfy for a man of Santa's talents. The fruit and nuts could be ordered in August and stored in one of Santa's "cold grottos", the toys would be banged out by the elves in November and even delivery only took an hour or two when there were only about 250 million people in the world, and most of them didn't celebrate Christmas.

For the rest of the year Santa could spend his time spear-fishing, relaxing on genuinely uninhabited desert islands or reading Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum in the original Latin.

Like everyone else, though, Santa has seen the world become both more frenetic and demanding, and he's been faced with the same choice: either to embrace technology to its fullest extent, or risk becoming marginalised by online competition.

Therefore, since the 1960s, Santa has considered himself an early adopter of new technology. His was the first organisation in the Arctic Circle to take delivery of an IBM System/360 mainframe, on which he stored all his "letters to Santa", production data and developed the first good/bad database system, migrating to it from an IMS database in the 1970s, to a DB2 relational database in the 1980s, when he also introduced analytics.

Indeed, it was in the 1980s that Santa could positively feel the winds of change gusting through his organisation, not because someone had left the door open, but when his chief financial officer, Keith, insisted on using a "PC" he'd bought himself to crunch the numbers in "Lotus 1-2-3".

Since then, change has become increasingly relentless, and instead of spending much of the year on holiday or with his nose in a good book (like the good old days), Santa has to work harder than ever to keep up - not just with global population, social trends and consumer demands, but also in terms of the technological infrastructure to support his organisation.

These efforts have been a success. Today, Santa has more customers than ever, production facilities in major manufacturing centres across the world, and an IT infrastructure encompassing cloud computing, software-defined networking, big-data analytics, and a just-in-time supply-chain management system that really does "do what it says on the tin".

Even Santa's sleigh has had a makeover. While on the surface it remains resolutely traditional in design, his chief mechanic Sharon has fitted anti-lock brakes, an up-rated suspension, and sensors that feed directly back to her the status of all the critical on-board systems.

Indeed, it was Sharon who also suggested that, in addition to satnav, the sleigh should be fitted with a vehicle tracking system so that girls and boys around the world would be able to track Santa's progress throughout Christmas Eve - although Santa insists that this feature is switched off when he takes his holidays at the beginning of January.

To read more about how technology has revolutionised the way Santa's enterprise works click here.