Nadesha Ranasinghe, VP of Offer Engine Development at Accelya, oversees the architecture, development, delivery, and optimization of Accelya Offer Engines (FLX Merchandise, FLX Shop and Price, FLX Availability Calculator, and FLX Schedule Builder), ensuring all engines are highly performant and ready for massive scalability. 

Nadesha joined Farelogix in 2009 as a database administrator and was promoted within a year to Director of IT, a role he held until he was appointed VP of Offer Engine Development in 2018. As Director of IT, Nadesha focused on infrastructure operations, ensuring that all critical technology environments – including the systems hosted at the offsite data center, databases, and network infrastructure – were operational 24/7 x 365. He also led change management, orchestrating the release of new code into different environments, including QA, UAT for customer testing, and Production; and ensuring the scalability of key technology platforms. Nadesha was also responsible for the company’s security infrastructure, ensuring compliance with all industry security mandates, and implementing state-of-the-art internal security controls to prevent breaches. Under his guidance, the IT team also managed the development of the Data Tier of Farelogix’ flagship technology, ensuring a seamless interface between applications and databases using its Open Connect. Nadesha led the support team as well as local and offshore help desks; was responsible for maintaining the QA platform used by other stakeholders at Farelogix for testing; and guided the company’s BI and Data Science efforts. 

Prior to joining Farelogix, Nadesha was a software specialist at the University of Miami and held several other roles in project management and database engineering. He has a B.Sc. in Computer Science and an MBA in Management Information Systems from the University of Miami.

Episode transcription:

[00:00:00] Nadesha Ranasinghe: One topic. I think that's pretty important for us. That is something we've been focusing on is just optimization. So if you write your own applications, it's something that you have full control over. Then by going back and taking a look at your application and seeing whether Al algorithms can be optimized.[00:00:20] We are finding that, you know, there's potentially massive savings there, right? Because if we can take our code and optimize it and maybe make it run 20, 30, or maybe even 50% faster, what that does is it saves us 20, 30, 40, 50% on our infrastructure or cloud hosting costs. So I think it's something that, you know, everyone should kind of be.[00:00:40] Taking a look at it from at least the executive should be taking a look at it from that perspective, because it's, it's pretty powerful.[00:01:11] Hi, I'm Natasha Rhonda singer. I'm the VP of Offer Engine Developmen at Accelya.[00:01:17] Jahn Karsybaev: Thanks so much for finding time, joining us on the Ivy Podcast today. You know, we're glad to connect with you at the beginning of the year, start of the new periods, you know, try to put that whole pandemic, everything behind us.[00:01:31] Tell us a little bit more about yourself, about your background, and then, I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about where you're currently working on.[00:01:38] Nadesha Ranasinghe: Sure. Sure. And thanks, Jahn, for hosting me here. I sincerely do hope 2021 is going to be completely different from 2020. I can tell you from a travel industry perspective, that's where we work in the travel space, we are seeing things, you know, getting a little bit better, but it's a long road to recovery.[00:02:00] I think for us, just in terms of, you know, getting everyone comfortable with flying, getting business, traveling back to where it needs to be, but we're optimistic that 2021 starts that journey for us.[00:02:11] So my background really, I'm kind of all over the place. I just like technology. But I really was specializing in database, specifically Mi