Software People Stories

In this episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Bharath Kumar who is a Marketeer from a Technologist, Head Of Marketing & Cx - Zoho Creator and he’s a Marketing and Content Specialist.

In his career spanning over two decades, he shares very interesting stories –

• Started his career in Infosys as a software engineer
• Found that his interests was in organizing events, quizzes and packaging and presenting the ideas were his strengths
• During his career as a mainframe engineer, Bharath found that he was the most approachable and decided to approach a career in marketing
• He talks about creating every day a great day and understanding what according to him made him feel great
• Shares his stories on what led him to choose marketing in MBA
• Bharath shares his dichotomy of experience in Madura Micro Finance Ltd
• Endearing stories on being a communication - content management and head of circle communication for airtel
• Bharath shares some of the data orientation and how to wear the data hat and keep visibility of the brand 
• Identifying the patterns of data using clarity and ethical values. 
• Bharath also shares how he always has the analytical mind and the eye for color/ patterns at the same time. In fact Bharath recommends that all of us need to keep this model

Bharath considers himself as an entrepreneurial marketeer. Bharath has 14+ years of professional work experience that helped him develop expertise in the areas of Lead Generation, Marketing communications, Brand management, Marketing strategy & Content marketing. 

Bharath is the marketing head for Zoho Creators for the last 5 years. Prior to that, Bharath was in the product marketing team for Ramco system and TinyOwl. He was the head of communication of Tamil Nadu Circle for Airtel where he was responsible for the content delivery and creating the brand promise for Airtel. Bharath was a software engineering in Infosys for 3 years. 

Bharath graduated from College of Engineering Guindy in Mining Engineering and Great Lakes Institute of management. 

Bharath can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bharathkumarb-marketer/ 

In this episode, I asked Tom Pierce, the president and founder of Integrated Information Systems (I2S) responds to my question on how the ‘integrated’ in his company name is internalized by his clients. He responded to that question and shared many more interesting thoughts in this episode. He shared:

• How their weekly 5 hour workshops for clients, to get vibrant conversations going
• How he uses music in some of his interactions
• His belief in segmentation and appropriate responses, rather than fragmentation
• His experience with music, when practicing first base alone and getting the big picture when the full team came together
• His metaphor from baseball, on being present and aware of the other players and take decisions
• Why preparation and practice trumps planning alone
• How Covid had a negative impact on collaboration
• About drawing from how children learn music to make software teams more effective
• How the artistry of code can be better when a team member ‘listens’ to the rest of the team members
• How children are very perceptive, while AI [alexa] is not
• His career tips for those considering a career in IT and those considering a switch mid-career, from non-tech to tech roles
• He also draws from his experience of holding his first grand child in his hands the first time.. Beautiful!, in responding to a question of patience and a sense of urgency or rushing through life
• How he finds time for being interested and engaged in multiple activities



Tom Pierce is the president and founder of Integrated Information Systems (I2S) of Louisville, Kentucky. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Wake Forest University (1981) and a Master’s in Divinity (1993) from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. 

After serving as an officer in the US Army, Tom has been immersed in the design and support of manufacturing software, as well as in the data-driven analysis of business and financial systems, primarily in large manufacturing facilities within the Aerospace Defense sector. 

A self-described MRP philosopher and ERP contrarian, Tom is a passionate advocate of simple approaches to complex problems. As a stubbornly resolute moderate, his company seeks to promote intelligent integrity by avoiding the opposing traps of overly simplistic naivety and overly complicated sophistication. 

For roughly four decades, Tom has focused his career and his company on the pursuit of trustworthy clarity and practical understanding of information, which is the light of all human pursuits. 

In this episode, Tom Pierce, the president and founder of Integrated Information Systems (I2S), shares:

• Many in his family had been in military service
• In his first assignment, being assigned to the analysis team because he has a background in math and computers
• Grabbing an opportunity to use a computer that was unused
• Doing some simulation modeling solutions
• Leaving the army in good terms and going back to school
• Working for a defense contractor and then starting his own defense contracting firm
• Leveraging his experience in the military to solve civilian problems
• Some generational differences in the approach to merge technology and processes
• His experience of the rules and hierarchical models of working in the military, where, on the lighter side, ‘you cannot do anything without breaking some rule’
• Some examples of streaks of entrepreneurship that ran in his family
• The last straw that pushed him into entrepreneurship: a sense of frustration about how businesses were run and having his own values and ideas of how to run a company
• Not compromising on the value of working with end users
• How tech fluency is more important than tech savviness

Tom Pierce is the president and founder of Integrated Information Systems (I2S) of Louisville, Kentucky. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Wake Forest University (1981) and a Master’s in Divinity (1993) from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. 

After serving as an officer in the US Army, Tom has been immersed in the design and support of manufacturing software, as well as in the data-driven analysis of business and financial systems, primarily in large manufacturing facilities within the Aerospace Defense sector. 

A self-described MRP philosopher and ERP contrarian, Tom is a passionate advocate of simple approaches to complex problems. As a stubbornly resolute moderate, his company seeks to promote intelligent integrity by avoiding the opposing traps of overly simplistic naivety and overly complicated sophistication. 

For roughly four decades, Tom has focused his career and his company on the pursuit of trustworthy clarity and practical understanding of information, which is the light of all human pursuits

I continue my conversation with Jeremy Snyder, the founder and CEO of FireTail.io, an end-to-end API security startup. Towards the end of the first part, I asked Jerermy ‘how a developer should think, when using APIS - with so many moving parts - from security and performance aspects’

He answers that and continues to share his story relating to:

• The extensive experience his co-founder has with API based architectures and implementations
• How APIs can implement business functions or offer specific extracts of data held in applications
• First, understanding how APIs could be compromised, to pick the scope for what their company firetail should be addressing
• How many breaches are related to authentication and authorization
• Why a zero-trust approach is very critical and the good practice of sharing only minimum data that needs to be shared
• The importance of central logging
• How he manages to get a good night’s sleep, while playing a very crucial role in the chain of enterprise security in an API based solution
• His personal practices to handle pressure at work and stay calm
• The story behind naming their company firetail
• How he developed an interest in learning many languages
• Jeremy asked me about my linguistic interests
• His career tips

Social media: https://twitter.com/halffinn , https://www.linkedin.com/company/77663520 , https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremysnyder/

Jeremy is the founder and CEO of FireTail.io, an end-to-end API security startup. Prior to FireTail, Jeremy worked in M&A at Rapid7, a global cyber leader, where he worked on the acquisitions of 3 companies during the pandemic. Jeremy previously led sales at DivvyCloud, one of the earliest cloud security posture management companies, and also led AWS sales in southeast Asia. Jeremy started his career with 13 years in cyber and IT operations. Jeremy has an MBA from Mason, a BA in computational linguistics from UNC, and has completed additional studies in Finland at Aalto University. Jeremy speaks 5 languages and has lived in 5 countries. Jeremy was once kicked off a train in central Sweden, and another time went several days without seeing another human, but did see lots of reindeer.

Link to my podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ask-a-ciso/id1596056884

In this conversation, Jeremy Snyder, the founder and CEO of FireTail.io, an end-to-end API security startup, shares his professional journey and perspectives. Specifically, 

• How he got into IT in the late 90s, when technology was coming into businesses
• Early experience in Linux, VAX and Unix and implementing solutions for a translation agency
• Being responsible to evaluate, implement and integrate with various systems and thereby increasing the empathy for users and their situations
• Moving to work with one of the solution providers and taking up tech support roles and trying his hand at software development
• Getting into and liking the infrastructure related roles
• His experience, as an IT infrastructure professional, of working with software developers
• The ‘healthy’ struggle between the two roles and how IT teams would specify the environments to develop and deploy into
• IT teams wanting to conserve resources and giving very limited capacities for developers
• Days when 98% availability was taken as acceptable and when crashes occurred, devs and IT teams would work overtime to find fault with the other team
• Starting with Amazon AWS in 2010 when cloud computing was just evolving
• Understanding the power of virtualized environments and why that needs a different way of thinking about data centers, getting away from the server-hugger mentality
• The need for users to develop trust in the cloud model of working
• The experience with gaining customer confidence in the cloud model in terms of stability, security etc
• The harder aspect of addressing cultural issues triggered by fear of losing jobs by IT personnel
• Taking up other roles in smaller companies and understanding the security and vulnerability risks that companies could get exposed to
• Perimeter controls, endpoint protection, logging and monitoring etc
• From replicating data center structures to auto scaling infrastructure using containers and serverless architectures
• These resulting in more and more API based architectures

Social media: https://twitter.com/halffinn

https://www.linkedin.com/company/77663520

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremysnyder/ 

Jeremy is the founder and CEO of FireTail.io, an end-to-end API security startup. Prior to FireTail, Jeremy worked in M&A at Rapid7, a global cyber leader, where he worked on the acquisitions of 3 companies during the pandemic. Jeremy previously led sales at DivvyCloud, one of the earliest cloud security posture management companies, and also led AWS sales in southeast Asia. Jeremy started his career with 13 years in cyber and IT operations. Jeremy has an MBA from Mason, a BA in computational linguistics from UNC, and has completed additional studies in Finland at Aalto University. Jeremy speaks 5 languages and has lived in 5 countries. Jeremy was once kicked off a train in central Sweden, and another time went several days without seeing another human, but did see lots of reindeer.

•  Link to my podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ask-a-ciso/id1596056884

In this episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Nanthakumar Arumugam who is a Technologist, Delivery Lead at ThoughtWorks and he’s a Quality Engineer and Financial Expert.

In his career spanning over two decades, he shares very interesting stories –

• Nantha started his career as an instrumentation engineer within Polyester firm. His interest gravitated towards the PLC programming and that led him to join the software engineering full time
• Nantha joined Ready Test Go as a Quality engineer where he got his skill in the world of startup and certification world
• Nantha shares how the waterfall way of working had provided different domains and worked in 20 different programs in a very short period of time
• He also covers how he and his team ramped up on the domain and program rapidly 
• Automation as a practice he gravitated to reduce the manual regression suite 
• Nantha talks about the background on how Selenium tool came in as an antidote to the mercury tools (winrunner / loadrunner)
• Nantha shares his expertise on the passage of Automation CoE and a separate team
• Nantha talks about several hats he has worn in ThoughtWorks and shares the changes on how business interactions within Technology
• He further shares the distance that’s reduced between business leads and access to leads to identify solution options
• Nantha talks about the availability of tools that has made the business outcomes come out as soon as possible
• Nantha shares some of the key wisdom on how one has to build expertise in different facets of experience 

Nantha is the delivery lead and project manager in ThoughtWorks. He has been working with ThoughtWorks for a decade. He has played several roles including Quality Analyst, Quality Lead, Architect and Chennai Chapter lead prior to taking the current role. Nantha has done his PG in BITS Pilani and B.E. in University of Madras 

Nanthakumar can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nanthakumara/

In this episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Saikat Chakrabarty who is a Technologist, Director, Engineering at Mihup and he’s a AI/ML and Computer Vision Enthusiast.

In his career spanning over a decade, he has been a Telecom engineer, prompt engineering, Interaction designer and conversational AI. 

• Saikat is working in the pioneering world of building AI tools that map the man machine and the person
• He’s working in the contact center engineering by understanding the questions and asks from our customers
• Saikat started his career in creating software for LTE within 4G Telecom providers and says that he has not looked back from there
• Saikat’s team in Mihup creates the analysis of the several thousand conversations between the customer and contact center and understand the sentiment of the user
• Listen to the conversation on how the vernacular language support is being created in the AI platform to build accuracy
• Understand that initial days you have to choose the right place to work and always stay invested in oneself
• Saikat also talks about his mantra of “Don't choose an easy path and continue to learn”
• Saikat talks about his interests in Medical and Computer science and Brain networks are working. Saikat believes that the future bet is lying on medical access across the globe
• Saikat says that software changes in months not years - you have to keep yourself updated daily and that’s the only way to stay relevant 
• He’s also deep believer of the growth of the technology in Tier 3 cities within India given the organizations changing to remote first or Hybrid

Saikat has been instrumental in Mihup's success as one of the leading Conversational AI companies in India. He leads the entire tech organisation at Mihup, with a team of almost 20 people working under him, ranging from Devops to MLEs, overseeing the end to end development and shipping of the Mihup products.

Saikat Chakrabarty is a dynamic leader and Senior Engineering Manager at Mihup, a pioneering conversational AI platform founded in 2016. Mihup's revolutionary approach empowers individuals to seamlessly interact with the digital world while prioritizing inclusivity and accessibility, regardless of language, accent, or dialect.

Technical Leadership:

At Mihup, Saikat has successfully managed and mentored cross-functional teams in machine learning, R&D, product development and DevOps. His expertise in managing the development of Mihup's conversational AI products has positioned him as a trusted leader in the industry. With a deep understanding of a wide range of technologies, including Java (Spring Boot), NodeJs, Golang, Angular, Python, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kubernetes, and more, Saikat has played a pivotal role in building highly scalable cloud microservices and optimizing premise-based applications.

Diverse Experience:

Saikat's wealth of experience extends beyond his role at Mihup. He has previously worked with renowned companies like Lexmark and Polaris Network Inc., where he honed his skills and passion for AI/ML and computer vision. His contributions to these cutting-edge fields have resulted in 2 patents and 6 paper publications, consolidating his exceptional knowledge and expertise.

Recognition and Awards:

Saikat's exceptional contributions and dedication to his craft have earned him notable accolades throughout his career. Notably, he was awarded the prestigious Digital Transformation Award at Lexmark Focus-2-Future, alongside the Manager Appreciation Award and several other commendations. At Mihup, he has regularly been the recipient of special rewards for his undying passion and dedication towards delivering products that customers love to use.

Saikat can be contacted at Saikat Chakrabarty:

In this episode, I continue my conversation with Presenjit Sarkar, who is a Technologist, Innovator, Disruptor - and  distinguished engineer with Rubrik inc.

In his career spanning over 25 years, he has been a researcher, inventor, startup founder among other key roles he has played.

I asked Prasenjit, if an entrepreneur should take outside help in building teams and people..

The answer to that question and a lot more in the second part of the conversation.

Today, he talks about:

• Taking professional support to build a psychological profile of a new hire
• The importance of reaching out to references and understand any challenges the candidates faced
• How he finds time to manage multiple things and also stay current on technology, competition etc
• Why one should not try to do everything oneself, particularly the founders, rather focus on the core strengths
• His thoughts on data protection and data quality
• Some career tips for roles related to data science

I asked Prasenjit in building teams and people, if an entrepreneur should take outside help..

The answer to that question and a lot more in the second part of the conversation.

Stay tuned in for the next episode.

Prasenjit Sarkar is a Distinguished Engineer at Rubrik responsible for the architecture and development of relational, NoSQL, and Big Data backup and recovery products. He has previously led initiatives to formulate product strategy, deliver industry-leading backup and recovery features, and superior performance at scales of thousands of databases.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/psarkar24/

On X - @psarkar24

In this episode, Sivaguru is in conversation with Presenjit Sarkar, who is a Technologist, Innovator, Disruptor - and  distinguished engineer with Rubrik inc.

In his career spanning over 25 years, he has been a researcher, inventor, startup founder among other key roles he has played.

Today, he talks about:

• His background, growing up years in India
• Doing his PhD and moving to corporate research, as he is more of a hands on person
• After about 15 years with IBM, as a successful research scientist, left to start a company
• Getting enterprise customers and then getting acquired by another company
• Having experience in large, small companies, startups, connected to academia
• Working in storage, big data management, backup and recovery space
• Moving from data protection to data security
• The experience of shifting from academics to corporate
• How research focuses on thought leadership, while the priority in corporate is about market leadership
• The pleasures and pains of founding a startup
• The feelings when one’s startup is acquired by someone else
• Aspects of chemistry and work styles that play out in acquisitions
• The need to be pragmatic, accept decisions, adjust and move ahead
• Tips to manage one’s personal stresses and some techniques that have worked for him, particularly during transitions
• His tips for motivating people, and sharing your founder’s vision and excitement with the team that joins you
• Managing people, their aspirations and expectation, ambitions - is more difficult to manage

The answer to that question and a lot more in the second part of the conversation.

Stay tuned in for the next episode.

Prasenjit Sarkar is a Distinguished Engineer at Rubrik responsible for the architecture and development of relational, NoSQL, and Big Data backup and recovery products. He has previously led initiatives to formulate product strategy, deliver industry-leading backup and recovery features, and superior performance at scales of thousands of databases.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/psarkar24/

On X - @psarkar24

In this episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman has the conversation with Kamala Srinivasan who is a Technologist, Founder & CEO, Upahara, and women in tech influencer.

In her career spanning over 25 years, she has been a STEM engineer, fintech developer, women in tech influencer and startup founder among other key roles she has played.

• Kamala grew up in a home with professors and engineers she recalls how having a clean room with AC blasting made her fascinated with the technology industry
• Kamala shares her experiences of introducing reverse mentoring in India to enable senior people understand the pulse of the young people 
• Started her career in the early 90s in the technology industry and worked in the financial sector 
• Shares her decision making nugget to create a calculated move with the family onboard as well as a clear time
• Kamala shares that one needs to take care of self be it in your physical and mental state
• Kamala talks about her experience in fintech companies in India and US and how she found very less women in her age group. This made her take a call in the non-profit organization
• Kamala talks about creating ethically viable future and gives examples for that
• Kamala shares how her company is an app in your mobile phone to provide the application to connect people in need with people who would like to give. Her firm Upahara.com provides that service and she wants to share more about the firm in the future 
• She shares some of the her book recommendation and philosophies that has helped her ground
• Kamala shares tips on networking that listeners can help stay connected and learning from others

A technologist and an exec coach with more than 20 years of experience in both nonprofit organizations and technology industries. Kamala’s broad areas of expertise include global technology product delivery and operations, go-to-market strategy, digital transformation, and SAAS in Fintech, retail, legal, and media.

Kamala’s expertise in non-profit and philanthropic fields, and in information technology has led her to seek a solution using emerging technology to create a robust platform that serves the needs of both donors and charitable organizations: a personalized, curated, discovery-based interface, connecting organizations and donors without extensive effort on both sides, like Fintech investment management products. 

www.linkedin.com/in/kamalasrinivasan/ 

https://twitter.com/Kamalasrini