Previous Occupation: Vice President, Business Development, InfoKall Enterprise Solutions. Head of Indian operations as profit centre and sales responsibility for APAC and EMEA regions.

InfoKall is a global software services and product-oriented organisation with presence in five countries. It is a platinum partner to SeeBeyond, SAP and TeamTIBCO, and the market leader in enterprise application integration. The main focus areas of business development are EAI, ERP, Wireless Applications, e-business and professional services.

Present Occupation: Vice President, Sales and Operations, InMage Systems.  This is a Silicon Valley-based technology startup, continuously innovating disk-based Data Protection Technology in Storage Area Network Domain. As one of the co-founders of this company, I started the Engineering Centre from Hyderabad and now handle the APAC and EMEA sales.

Setting up this end-to-end product development centre with complete engineering responsibility was a challenge in the Indian IT industry scenario, carrying a service model legacy which we proved successful. Unlike many other captive centres that do peripheral and/or spill over work such as support and application development services around the core product, we took the challenge of transforming the engineering roadmap to delivering a competitive product in the complex SAN domain.

Sector: Information Technology

Work Experience: 19 years

Interests – Professional/Personal: Working in startups/SBU’s/profit centres and contributing to all business functions to ensure stabilisation and be part of the success of the organisation. Personal interests are traveling, playing badminton, and adventure water sports such as scuba diving and kayaking.

Tell us about yourself – your profile, recap your professional life after your under-graduate education including your career progression.
My core competence is building organisations from startup stage and developing them to achieve set objectives. I performed consistently by achieving the business goals within the budgets with a focus on top and bottom line, delivering value to all the stakeholders. My experience covers business development, operations and sales in the domain of information technology, telecom and electronic equipment. I am energetic and perseverant with strong motivational skills. I have business acumen to increase revenues with a focus on profitability and am well versed with international businesses in the IT services sector.

I started my career in sales with a small electronics and telecommunications organisation. I initially started selling consumer and institutional electronic products and equipment. I worked for four years expanding my role into procurement, production, channel development and alliances.

Later I began an IT consulting firm in ERP providing implementation services in Oracle Apps focusing on APAC (particularly Japanese markets). I did well for three years before the recession hit globally.

In 1999, I joined StreamSoft, a telecom billing software product development company as product manager. I gained some experience in customer-focused product development and global consulting.

In 2001, I joined InfoKall as Vice President, Business development. I acquired a  number of customers across India, APAC and UK regions and contributed around 30% of the total sales revenues to the organisation with EBIT of 35%. Working here helped me get experience in building strategic alliances with the objective of rapid customer acquisition.

In 2005, I became one of the early team members to start InMage, a technology startup in storage domain. I continue to deliver value to the organisation with my skills in sales, talent acquisition and global operations.

Describe your fondest memory at ISB.
Working in teams for various assignments and group cases was a great experience. If I have to pick one, then it is working on Sentra Software case during the course on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. For Entrepreneurial Strategy, we worked on a group simulation exercise, “An Impossible Mission.” It was thrilling, nerve-wracking and a real test of the learning at ISB. Though we could not beat the challenge, we were close to cracking the problem and narrowly missed the opportunity of being 1 out of 1000 groups who had the success rate.

With the knowledge and experience gained at ISB, tell us something that you will do differently in your professional life?
Prior to ISB, I was very task oriented with my entire focus on achieving the objective. Now I am trying to see the same task with different perspective, giving more importance to deriving and delivering value while producing the results. I am able to see the multi-dimensional approach in everything that I am doing.

What are some new trends in your current work industry that can be shared as valuable knowledge-transfer?
Large enterprise data centres continue to grapple with explosive data growth, limited budgets, and increasing demand for higher levels of service. As a result, large enterprises in 2010 focused on data protection planning and spending on cost-controlling technologies such as data de-duplication, disk-based data protection solutions, and bandwidth-optimised replication.

Along with this trend is an increased need for better reporting and management of data as it moves through the phases of the data protection life cycle – backup, de-duplication, replication, restoration or recovery, erasure, and archiving. With limited budgets and staffing resources, these tools are key to ensuring that data protection service levels are met and that existing systems are tuned and optimised to operate at peak efficiency.

The new trend to answer this is CDP (Continuous Data Protection). CDP is a methodology that continuously captures or tracks data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data, enabling recovery points from any point in the past. CDP systems may be block-, file- or application-based and can provide fine granularities of restorable objects to infinitely variable recovery points
If you have to sum up ISB in one word:
A place where you get an opportunity to reinvent yourself.

What are the areas that you can contribute in to ISB?
Not really sure

Any other suggestions or feedback?
None

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