SaaS-y Implications for Cloudy Architectures

Sriram Subramanian is a Research Director within IDC AI and Automation Software Research group covering AI/ ML Lifecycle Management Software. His coverage on AI// ML Lifecycle management includes the tools, technologies, and end-user needs for building, training, tuning, running, and scaling the end-to-end life cycle for AI/ML solutions from experimentation to production. He advises vendors on product strategy, market positioning, and messaging; and buyers on implementing end to end scalable ML pipelines and AI-enabled digital transformation best practices to meet their business needs. Prior to joining IDC, Sriram was the founder and principal analyst at CloudDon, an independent market research and advisory services firm. He is a certified Yoga instructor passionate about teaching Yoga/ Healthier lifestyle to kids. He spends his free time playing cricket or outdoors with his kids.

An IIT-B Graduate and a Techie at heart, Deepak is the co-founder and CTO at Mindtickle, one of the latest Unicorns in India today. Mindtickle is the world’s leading sales enablement and training platform used by many Fortune 500 companies. An avid biker and mountain climber, Deepak loves mentoring the next generation of Indian entrepreneurs who are building from India, for the world!

Vijoy Pandey is Vice President, Emerging Technologies and Incubation (ET&I) at Cisco. ET&I is chartered to create and drive the next Bold Bets businesses for Cisco in an agile, ambitious, and entrepreneurial manner. Vijoy runs product, engineering, research and a product-led growth team. He is also the CTO for Cloud at Cisco. Vijoy has held various strategy, product and engineering leadership roles and has over 20 years of expertise in planet-scale distributed systems, cloud, operational excellence, and application-first software infrastructures which serve to complement his role as a technical visionary for a software-focused digital future. Before joining Cisco, he served as Head of Engineering at Google for the company’s global cloud networks, where he was responsible for developing software systems for intent-driven automation, observability, AI/ML-based data analytics, and application-level awareness. Vijoy has held the CTO role at various companies including IBM, and Blade Network Technologies, and has led large geo-diverse, agile product and engineering teams at Blade Network Technologies, Nortel, Alteon, and Google. Vijoy has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis. He currently holds over 80 patents in cloud, networking, AI/ML, and distributed systems.

Charu is the site leader for the growing Cloud + AI organization at IDC and the VP of Engineering leader in Azure Core leading Compute and Cloud Native technologies. She has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Anna University and a master’s degree in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Barbara. Charu has been with Microsoft for 30years and has worked in multiples roles. She is known for her engineering excellence, innovation, and organizational leadership. Charu has innovated in different areas of the Microsoft Cloud and is currently focused on understanding technology to build privacy preserving computational approaches. Over the years, Charu has led multiple initiatives across IDC that focused on building innovation excellence, empowering women leaders, and mentoring senior engineering talent. She was the founding members for Microsoft WISE Mentoring Program where tech leaders at Microsoft volunteer to mentor women in computer science and software engineering. She partnered with CII’s Centre of Excellence on their vision for Digital Transformation and is the board member on the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) National Committee on Technology.

Shankar Venkataraman is a distinguished technology leader and a pioneer in the streaming data and analytics, big data, and machine learning / AI space. He works as SVP of Products and Engineering at Jivo Corporation, which provides a cloud-based, data-driven platform for delivering personalized digital advertising and marketing experiences at scale. It is a powerful solution for engaging consumers with the right message in real-time and across all channels. Shankar holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor's degree in Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India.