Software People Stories

Conversation with a RPA and MI Lead Anuradha Venkatesh, at Ford with Gayatri Kalyanaraman from PM Power Consulting on

Starting her journey as a civil engineer and built bridges

After taking a career break during childbirth, Anuradha started in Geographic Information System as she stepped into software development

Anu shares her exciting journey across Java, BI Dev and RPA technologies while solving real problems with innovation and focus

Anuradha covers some of the interesting stories on keeping her day enjoyable and having fun with everything you do

How she keeps learning at the core even if there was lot of trepidation in the recent leap with RPA and soon in ecommerce

Anu shares her wisdom on how she’s chosen to travel for work based on impact that creates for the family and the risk it takes to make the change

Anu shares her perspective on Data security and how one has to have a balance while using apps and understand personalization benefits

Anu talks about being the first engineer in the extended family and talking about choice of his father to have got her married after 10th standard

Shares RPA story - Consider bots as another system in the team without any knowledge of system boundaries. It removes silos in the org and brings short term quick benefits

Creating a new frontier using image search and AI ML coming together would revolutionize day to day work

As a takeaway she asks everyone not to tag themselves in a specific bucket - be open and continue to explore

Anuradha Venkatesh, RPA AI & ML Lead – Ford Motor Company

Anuradha has spent over 25 years in the software industry; working on application delivery, business strategy, captive management and vendor management specialties.

She started her career as a civil engineer working in Kolkata and Mumbai. She stepped into software development after she took a break due to childbirth. She was a MIS manager for a GIS firm. She joined as a java developer in Hexaware in 2000. She later took up several interesting programs in Java and became a program manager. She joined HP in 2008 as a Sr. program manager and made the switch to ERP and BI systems.

In 2016, she joined Ford motor company. She continues in Ford right now. Anuradha is the RPA and ML lead for the marketing team within Ford.

Throughout her career, she has been recognized for bringing excellent relationship management and program management capabilities to the table. She’s also known to look at different ways of making delivery models effective.

Anuradha passed out of NIT, Warangal.

For more details, visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/anuradha-venkatesh-a301764/

Conversation with a Chief Digital Officer Sundar Sukavanam, at firstsource with Gayatri Kalyanaraman from PM Power Consulting on

Role of CDO has always been there with work done by CIO, CTO and the CEO

Digital has made people think of business models differently -

Digital office has quite a few roles like Intelligent Automation (RPA), machine first capability, partnerships, evangelization

Talks about 18,000 puzzle pieces coming together as an art!

Sundar talks about experience as an account manager working in the US for P&L leader

Wearing the architect hat (not being an empty suit), powering the enterprise for Cognizant and learnt how to make the most of it

Business Operations manager for the insurance team and understood the need for automation and shares stories

Sundara speaks about traveling across the globe and themes that triggered moves

Enterprise IT is like utility. No one knows when only till it stops working!

Think of the users in enterprise IT rather than the sponsors or the conduits

Alvin tofflers’ quote on twentieth century literate are those who learn, unlearn and relearn soon

Today it has to be fail fast, learn faster

Key takeaway for everyone should be to how do you balance what the technology can offer and what Human ingenuity can make happen

Sundara Sukavanam is Chief Digital Officer (CDO) at Firstsource Solutions. He drives the ‘Digital First, Digital Now’ agenda for the organisation with the focus to help our customers in their digital transformation journey.

Sundara leads Firstsource’s Digital Services including Intelligent Automation, Analytics, and scaling Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) offerings. He also manages global partnerships with industry-leading platforms in RPA, ML/AI and SaaS and integrates that IP into their solutions.

As part of the CIO’s office, Sundara built large scale enterprise platforms across Operations, Sales and Marketing, Planning and Forecasting, and Enterprise Performance Management, in partnership with the business.

Sundara is a business and technology leader with over 24 years of experience in the IT & Operations industry, working with the world’s leading corporations across the Manufacturing, Utilities, Retail, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Media & Information sectors – delivering solutions in Application Development, Core Modernization, Cloud Migration, Quality Assurance, Analytics and Intelligent Process Automation. Sundara has a Master’s degree from National Institute of Technology, India and Certifications from the Stanford Business School. He is based in the US with his wife and teenage son. Sundara is an avid reader and a sports buff.

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

Passion and Commitment, something that you will hear throughout this conversation with Pravin Gandhi, a pioneer in the Indian IT industry. With over 50 years in the industry, Pravin is known nowadays for his angel investing and mentorship of entrepreneurs. What you may not know is that his association with the industry started as a software professional! In his journey over the years, you will hear about spotting opportunities, wanting to solve other people’s problems and dreaming big.

In this conversation with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting, Pravin Gandhi talks about many things, including bringing Digital Equipment Corporation to India and closes with the need to embrace Digital!

Other things he speaks about include:

-Learning computers and programming in the 60s

-Being among the first 100 employees at TCS and them moving to Mafatlal Computer Services

-Switching out of the software development industry into an OR role

-Moving again, soon into a sales and marketing role to find his calling

-Leaving Coca Cola, just before they had to close down in India

-Converting an opportunity to join Tektronix, an instrumentation company just as they started introducing computerized instruments , to become a promoter of a new company, Hinditron

-About creating a pull by approached the end users

-How every entrepreneur should be nimble and read to pivot, when it comes to survival of the business

-How they were able to establish partnerships to make and sell PCs and solutions

-The experience of working with and selling to government officials

-Why he considers punctuality and respect for time to be very important

-What is a reasonable measure of success, for an entrepreneur

-Being a company builder and not a financier

-What the right age would be to start up and what it takes to make it work

-The role of a mentor, particularly for startups to grow and scale\

-2 questions he would like to ask entrepreneurs

-His experience and lessons learnt from starting a software company to build an ERP solution

-We, as a country, needing to dream big and large scale impact

-Opportunities in the IT sector for both entry level aspirants and mid-career professionals

Pravin Gandhi has over 50 years of entrepreneurial operational and investing experience in the IT industry in India. He was a founding partner of the first early stage fund India – INFINITY. Subsequently a founding partner in Seedfund I & II. With over 18 years of investing experience, he is extensively well networked in investment and entrepreneurial scene and is an active early stage angel investor in tech & impact space.

Pravin holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from Cornell University, and serves on the board of several private corporations in India. Pravin is a former President of the Manufacturers Association of Information Technology (an IT manufacturers association in India), He is a Past President of TiE Mumbai as well as an Ex-Global Trustee of The Indus Entrepreneurs. He was an Executive Committee of Nasscom in the past. He is on the board of SINE, IIT Mumbai Incubator. He serves on Investment Committee of Aavishkaar Bharat Fund.

A conversation with Kishan Malur, Product Manager andChitra Gurjar from PM Power Consulting on -

-His experience working with digital pay TV,Industrial IoT and Cloud Infrastructure

-Passion for Products, moving from the what to answering the why?

-A story about buying a computer and building a POS software

-Wearing different hats as a product manager

-Mastering empathy in 3 different ways

-Staying connected to your network, during the pandemic

-Coaching, paying it forward and other passions

-How to ask the right questions, 3 steps towards practising it

-3 messages for young people aspiring to be product managers

Kishan Malur is a Product Management Professional at VMware on Cloud Infrastructure. In his career, he has had the opportunity to build products in various areas like Cloud Video Delivery Platform, Internet of Things, Manufacturing, and now Cloud Infrastructure. In this exciting

journey, he has been instrumental in setting up high performing Multi-Site, Multi-Cultural Global Agile Teams, and leading complex global Tech Integrations for premium Customer Accounts.

Kishan is involved in contributing to the Product Community in India. He actively mentors professionals in Product Management. As a career coach, he helps professionals in Career Transformation and Acceleration. He has more than 300 hours of coaching experience and

Counting! Kishan holds an Executive MBA from the Institute of Product Leadership,

M.S. Software Systems from BITS Pilani, and a Bachelor’s degree from BMS College of Engineering, Bangalore. A fresh brew of Filter Coffee and Great Product conversations is something that Kishan usually doesn't say no to.

He can be reached via -

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kishanmalur/

Twitter - @KishanMalur

In conversation with Preethy Padman, Product Marketing Executive with Freshworks with Gayatri Kalyanaraman from PM Power Consulting

Preethy talks about her career starting in India working for networking software firms

She discovered her passion for technology and later in product development and later in product marketing. She has also tried being Chief of staff.

She talks about building a career leading to be a General manager and how all these career choices have made sense

Preethy shares a story on the risks that she has taken for a role and how that had helped her to understand new ways of working

It has also brought a real sense of being out of the comfort zone and continuous learner

Preethy talks about tips on building your first few weeks in a new firm

She elaborates on being a mindful practitioner and teacher as well as a volunteer and how the social engagements have helped her take decisions in her professional life

Preethy talks about stories around investing and how she chooses them

Preethy is passionate about creating a self awareness in oneself and taking time to do that

She also advises on building strong mentors relationships that work around you and create a habit that grows with you

Preethy Padmanabhan is the Head of Platform Product Marketing at Freshworks. Prior to joining Freshworks, Preethy was the VP of Marketing at Panzura. She is also an angel investment partner with SV2, Portfolia and a Board Member for Nextstem.ai. She started her career as a Software engineer at Hughes, India. She moved to the US to take up technical and business responsibilities in large companies such as Cisco and Dell. Later she moved to hi-tech startups such as Nutanix, Panzura and grew her career across product management, marketing and sales.

Preethy has 20+ years high tech and leadership experience across marketing, sales & engineering. She is a strategic problem solver and connector who brings teams together to create exponential value for companies. Preethy has strong leadership, management and people skills. She has effective interpersonal and communication skills with customers, partners. She has delivered multiple customer EBC, demos, sales & partner training, trade show presentations, webcasts etc.

Preethy has a high tech background in virtualization, Cloud, SaaS, Networking, Security, Collaboration, Video, Mobile, Enterprise & Service-Provider marketing. She is a self-starter, strong communicator with customers, partners, internal teams and a business leader with a can-do attitude

She served in various non-profit boards focused on economic empowerment, women, children and education. She’s a mindfulness teacher and lives with her husband, teenage son and their dog in Palo Alto, California.

Preethy can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/preepadu/

In this episode, Manoj Deorukhkar, CIO of Sterling and Wilson Pvt Ltd, shares his experiences and stories with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting about:

That he got into IT by accident

-His love for nature

-Starting his career in the steel industry

-Playing various roles in the organization, from shop floor to executive assistantship

-His transition to a CIO of a group company after implementing a corporate wide SAP rollout

-How entering IT at a later stage in his career and working with much younger colleagues created mental pressure

-How guidance from his CEO helped him identify his core strengths in the software development process

-That there is much more in the world than just IT

-That person to person conversations are very powerful and effective & how to bring out the best in individuals to make great teams

- Making time for intra-networking

- His advice for persons considering an entry into IT and for mid career IT professionals

- Three important things to keep in mind

Manoj Deorukhkar is the Chief Information Officer of Sterling and Wilson Pvt Ltd. (SWPL), part of the Shapoorji Pallonji group company.

Manoj brings a treasure of software development expertise and a massive track record of 20 years in the industry. He is an engineering leader with technology strengths comprising SAP portfolio, Information Security, Infrastructure, Cloud Strategy, Digital Transformation, Office applications, Budgeting, and Procurement.

He has driven various roles and tasks in business transformation initiatives across several domains. He trusts IT leaders must adopt a strategic management role and drive transformation throughout the enterprise. During his career, he has been associated with Real Estate, Engineering & Construction, EPC, Utilities, Oil & Gas, Metals, and Manufacturing sectors.

Manoj has earned his B. Tech degree from IIT Mumbai and holds an MBA degree from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai. He has wide experience in leading large projects and has directed the planning and implementation of enterprise IT systems in countries like the UK, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Singapore, and India.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/manoj-deorukhkar-1180316/

Listen to a conversation between Deepak Visveswaraiah, VP of Platform Engineering at Pega Systems and Chitra Gurjar from PM Power Consulting a s Deepak talks about

-His early days growing up as a Bangalore native and how he started out in software development

-Experiences as a C & Unix Programmer

-His work across several domains like Nuclear Energy, Semiconductors, gaming and publishing

-Co-founding a healthcare startup and learning key customer empathy lessons

-Essential fundamentals of product engineering, writing your best 2 lines of code, user empathy & designing products for the enterprise

-Investing time in learning & being adaptable

-Transition to leadership roles learning people engagement and flourishing as leader

-Lessons from driving innovation- future perspective design & doing a few things insanely well

-Customer centricity; all about the empathy, and what customers really want from you

-Hard lessons; from building a product the way “we engineers thought”

-Building relationships with a mindset of establishing a relationship and not to sell or make a transaction

-Balancing the sense of urgency with instant gratification and moving on the curve of constant change, a formula 1 inspiration

-Defining moments in his career; being the first SVP in a global role outside of the US

-Message for leaders and those aspiring to take up leadership roles

Deepak Visweswaraiah is a leader in the technology industry playing global roles based out of Bangalore, India. He specializes in leading large engineering organizations, driving innovation and bringing products into the global markets. He has extensive experience in establishing Global In-house Centers (GICs) for multinational companies. Passionate about building next generation technology, transformative approach, business leadership and mentoring startups. Deepak brings 30+ years of experience in the enterprise software development industry. Deepak is currently Vice President of Platform Engineering at Pega Systems leading the core platform organization out of India.

In this conversation Pankaj Rai, Leader of Strategy, Digital & Innovation teams at WellsFargo shares his stories with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting related to

-Growing up in a small, but cosmopolitan city

-How he was inspired by his Dad

-Getting into IIT, IIM and a startup

-The advice he got from his boss, when he moved from a consulting role to a lending advisor role

-When he decided to focus more on earning than learning

-The 4Es he learnt from Jack Welch

-About taking leaps of faith, particularly when it comes to role or career transitions

-On not having a fear of failure

-Comfortably navigating in what might appear as chaos

-Organizational strategy and culture

-The significance of collaboration and why win-win is so natural

-Importance of inclusion and diversity in deploying organizational strategies

-Not having different ‘official’ and ‘personal’ versions! No version control challenges

-Creating a personal priority list rather than a todo list

-Being updated on what is happening from the network

-His advice for IT career aspirants as well as mid-career IT professionals

-3C framework that he recommends for everyone

-Problem discovery more than problem solving, as a life skill

-Moving from a deterministic, order taking world to an agile world

Pankaj leads Strategy, Digital & Innovation teams at Wells Fargo where he is responsible for creating a culture of 3Es (effectiveness, efficiency and experience) in the operations across India and Philippines.

Prior to this he was with Dell where he led the Global Analytics team of over 400 members in Bangalore, supporting all the segments in Dell, i.e. marketing, online, supply chain and product quality, contact centers, services and DFS.

Pankaj started his professional career as a management consultant at Feedback Ventures and then went on to work in the financial services industry in India. He worked with ICICI and GE Capital in a variety of roles covering sales, risk management, six sigma and operations. He moved to Standard Chartered Bank leading the Program Management Office in their Singapore regional office where he helped grow their shared service centers in India and Malaysia.

Pankaj has been actively engaged in D&I and sustainability initiatives and has been engaged with various industry forums including NASSCOM.

Pankaj studied Electrical Engineering at IIT Delhi and went on to complete his MBA at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He is also a six sigma “Quality Leader” from GE. While at ICICI, Pankaj was among the 12 bankers selected for the British Council Chevening Fellowship (Young Bankers Program) administered at the London School of Economics in 1999.

Pankaj’s wife Ritu is an artist and they have two daughters Pragya and Paridhi. He is also an avid marathon runner, cyclist and dabbles in badminton.

Pankaj’s linked in Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pankaj-rai-he-him-b3923a/

Chitra Gurjar from PM Power Consulting in conversation with Anu Kannan, Partner Technology Manager at Google as Anu shared her views on

-Being a quintessential engineer

-Starting her career in embedded systems working on set top boxes

-Love for travel, meeting new people and developing relationships that have helped her personally and professionally

-Handling different use cases while building software for tangible hardware

-Walking the floors with her father to understand products and how they were used

-Visiting customers and incorporating a “DILO” approach to building products

-How she built a network of trust as a fellow of engineering

Creating a culture of innovation

-A peak into what automotive software could look like

- Her message for aspiring engineers

Anu Kannan is a partner technology manager at Google, an embedded systems engineer and mother to two young boys. She has had extensive experience in designing and developing software for tangible hardware in the course of her 17 year career where she built entertainment set top boxes, android based data capture solutions, and now working with automotive software on android. She recently completed the LEAD business program Stanford University on Innovation. Anu is a telecommunications engineer from RV College of Engineering Bangalore and has a masters degree in Computer Science from New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering.

She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/anukannan/

Today is a special day for us @ Software People stories where we are commemorating 100 stories completion and we decided to record with All three co-hosts Sivaguru, Chitra and Gayatri and talk about why podcasts and what makes them stay. Please expect some overlap conversations as this was a live conversation.

Highlights of the conversation

Sivaguru spoke about the origins of the podcast and how he wanted to capture the evolution of technology and the developments and it transitioned to real life stories and anecdotes that were never told

Chitra spoke about her penchant for the platform and wanting to be an RJ and how it has been a very satisfying experience. She shares her chance conversation with Neeraja to come onboard. Chitra also shares how the platform has helped to get ideas and implement them in a sustainable way.

Gayatri spoke about her interest in digital tools and ability to move away from her comfort zone and how nice it is to talk to people and connect with long lost relations. It is also wonderful to see emotions flow. She talks about listening to podcasts has pushed her fitness and hosting podcasts has made her a better listener.

More information about this special day is here http://pm-powerconsulting.com/podcast-100-episodes/