Anthony Lloyd

OpenText VP of Technology Services Anthony Lloyd is an IT professional with an impressive and diverse range of experience that spans a number of industries, from entertainment and retail to pharmaceuticals and technology.

A satellite engineer by trade, Lloyd spent six years of active duty in the US Air Force, which set the groundwork for a move into IT.

After leaving the Air Force and moving into networking, Lloyd worked his way up to being a network services manager and, eventually, to renting networks globally for Direct TV and Sony Pictures Entertainment, as well as running data centres for Warner Brothers.

After a role as CTO for a subprime mortgage lender, Lloyd held a number of consulting roles in the pharmaceutical world, including for Johnson&Johnson, Quality Health, and the state of New York, where he helped set up the statewide health information exchange. A six-year spell with Allergan Pharmaceuticals followed, where Lloyd managed the integration of acquisitions globally as a consultant.

“I spent six years flying all over the world,” he says. “When they would buy companies, we'd go in with a team and go through everything – from an infrastructure perspective – to plan and integrate those manufacturing facilities.”

Most recently, before joining OpenText in 2021, Lloyd ran the global infrastructure for educational publisher John Wiley & Sons.

“I've been fortunate enough to have worked in several different industries in technology,” says Lloyd. “I've worked in pharma, I've worked in entertainment, healthcare, financials, and I've worked in high tech. So I've had the opportunity to learn a lot from working in those various industries because they all have their own idiosyncrasies. But I've also been able to be successful with what I bring to the table and to all of those various opportunities.”

As a leader, Lloyd explains that working as a team is absolutely essential for success, a quality that was instilled in him during his time in the Air Force.

“The Air Force is very much focused on attention to detail and doing things right the first time,” he says. “But, most importantly, you live or you die as a team. There is no one person; there's a team where everybody has a part to play, with everybody's role and responsibility just as critical or as important as anyone else's. And I try to instil that in all of my teams.”

For Lloyd, leadership is about empowering people and providing tools, resources and support to enable them to be successful. “I'm still very technical, but that's not my job,” he says. “You don't want me configuring switches and routers, but I have to empower those folks who are configuring the switches and the routers, and the folks who are building the servers and getting them the things that they need so that they can do it successfully and efficiently, so that they can work smarter and not harder. 

“Really, my challenge is to make sure that, as we're assessing technology, we’re looking at solutions to be able to understand how I can make them most successful.”

The focus on the importance of teamwork is a lesson the dynamic, strategic leader remembers from earlier in his career.

“My first real manager was a gentleman by the name of Ralph Luna, and he was the person who gave me my first management job. He told me something then that was really important: you're only as good as your team is,” Lloyd concludes. 

“That really instilled in me the focus on building a successful team and making sure that you always focus your energies on making your team successful. Through them being successful, you will become successful, too.”

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