Content consumption has changed significantly. Audiences now want everything – news, entertainment, sports and so on – on their own terms. What does this mean for CIOs in media and entertainment? To find out, CIO Dimension spoke with Harmit Singh Malhotra, Chief Technology Officer of NDTV Profit and a tech veteran with over 20 years of experience in broadcasting. 

From leading projects in live news rooms and international sports events to driving advancements in OTT and remote production, Harmit has worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. In this interview, he shares key insights on the industry’s evolution and what lies ahead for CIOs.

You come with over two decades of experience in the broadcast media space, having worked with many of the top brands in the Media industry. Would you like to recall some key moments in this journey?

My journey in broadcast media began in 2003 with Network18, where I was fascinated by the unique opportunities this industry offers to tech leaders. From the very start, I realized there is never a dull moment in this space—it’s a field where creativity and technology converge to create impactful stories and experiences.

During my tenure at Network18, I contributed to several key projects, including the launch of CNBC-Awaaz, IBN-Lokmat, COLORS, and CNBC Bajar. Each of these ventures showcased the power of technology in shaping how audiences consume content.

One of the most exciting projects in my career came in 2013 while working with Star Sports, where we implemented India’s first-ever remote production for international sports events. We wanted to move away from the traditional model of deploying large production crews at global venues. So, we introduced a streamlined workflow: live feeds were transmitted from international venues to a central hub, where commentary was added, and localised broadcasts were produced. This project delivered significant cost savings and maintained the highest production standards, setting a new benchmark for the industry. 

Following this, I worked for leading media organisations such as Republic Media Network and Enterr10. A key achievement during this period was spearheading the launch of Dangal Play’s OTT platform, where I oversaw the entire Tech workflow—from content and delivery to user experience design. This project provided great insights into the world of streaming platforms. 

Currently, I spearhead the technology operations at NDTV Profit, managing all aspects of technical and delivery from our Mumbai hub. This role allows me to continue exploring the potential of technology in media while adapting to the industry’s changing demands.

Tell us a bit more about your role at NDTV Profit and how you navigated the acquisition of BQPrime and its merger with NDTV Profit. 

In my current role at NDTV Profit, I oversee Corporate IT, Broadcast Engineering, and Cybersecurity, ensuring seamless integration across these critical functions. I lead a team responsible for maintaining efficient workflows, real-time content production, and multi-platform content delivery—spanning satellite broadcasting and digital streaming.

A key aspect of my role is managing critical infrastructure, including network systems, security frameworks, and core IT operations, all within a single, integrated team. This ensures cross-functional collaboration, innovation, and agility, allowing us to adapt to evolving industry demands. 

During the acquisition, strategic foresight played a crucial role in guiding our technology choices, ensuring compatibility with NDTV’s existing systems. During our transition and expansion, we prioritized proactive planning and seamless system integration, minimizing disruptions and ensuring a smooth operational flow. Close collaboration between teams allowed us to overcome technological challenges, facilitating a smooth and efficient transition post-merger.

As we continue to evolve, our focus remains on leveraging technology, strengthening cybersecurity frameworks, and enhancing operational efficiencies to position NDTV Profit as a leader in business news broadcasting.

I’m really curious about how content consumption and viewing patterns are evolving, especially post-COVID. Digital has clearly become the go-to medium for many. How do you see these trends shaping up?

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a big transformation in the way we consume media. Digital platforms emerged as the primary source of entertainment and information during this phase. But I think this shift stayed and paved the way for many key trends that continue to shape the media landscape. Here’re a few that I would like to highlight: 

Streaming services take centre stage: Channel streaming plays a big role in reaching a global audience. By leveraging the power of channel streaming, we can deliver excellent, personalised experiences to a diverse and expansive audience, ensuring our content remains relevant and impactful in the digital age.

The rise of short-form content: Short-form content has become increasingly popular, especially among younger audiences. Platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have revolutionised content consumption with their bite-sized, engaging videos. 

Personalized viewing experiences: Algorithms have become the backbone of personalized viewing experiences. Streaming services and social media platforms use sophisticated algorithms to recommend content based on user preferences. 

OTT platforms and Smart TVs: The integration of internet connectivity into televisions has transformed traditional TV viewing. OTT platforms offer vast content that can be accessed directly through smart TVs. This evolution has blurred the lines between conventional TV and digital streaming.

Social Media as a news source: Social media platforms have become crucial news sources, especially for younger generations. Platforms like X, Facebook, etc make it ideal for staying updated on current events. However, this has also underscored the importance of authenticity and trust in news consumption, as misinformation can spread rapidly across these channels.

Interactive and immersive content: Today audiences want more engaging experiences. Interactive and immersive content has  thusgained traction. Virtual concerts, online gaming, and live-streaming events offer unique and participatory experiences. The growing popularity of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) further enhances these interactive elements, creating a more dynamic media landscape.

That’s quite a lot on the plate for a CIO in the media and entertainment space! What are the opportunities and challenges that you see as a tech leader in this industry today? 

Speed and agility are paramount in the digital age. CIOs must prioritize digital-first strategies, ensuring rapid news dissemination across social media platforms. This requires a robust cloud infrastructure to enable real-time content delivery and personalized experiences based on audience preferences and location. Cloud technology, for example, is the cornerstone of our operations. Cloud platforms like AWS and Azure provide the foundation for our entire workflow, from content acquisition and processing to delivery and audience engagement.

One of the key challenges is the complexity of delivering content across multiple platforms and devices whilst maintaining quality and user experience. CIOs must prioritise building scalable infrastructure, including Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). As CDNs distribute content across a network of servers closer to users, it helps in minimizing latency and improving delivery times – making it crucial for modern media organisations.

You mentioned Cloud. Tell us how Cloud is driving some key business use cases for NDTV Profit. 

As a media organization, we are transitioning to a cloud-first approach, leveraging cloud platforms for content delivery, ad insertion, and audience targeting. This allows us to personalise content and ad experiences for viewers in different regions, enhancing the viewer experience and improving ad effectiveness.

We are also exploring edge computing, which brings processing power closer to the network’s edge. This enables faster response times and reduced latency, which is crucial for live streaming and interactive content. I believe cloud and edge computing will play an increasingly vital role in shaping the future of media delivery, enabling us to provide personalized content experiences to audiences worldwide.

What technological advancements do you foresee transforming newsrooms and studios in the coming years?

The media landscape is on the verge of a significant transformation. We are quickly moving away from traditional, cable-dependent workflows to IP-based production, which will efficiently transmit high-quality video signals over high-bandwidth networks. This shift will revolutionize our operations, enhancing flexibility and scalability.

AI is another technology that has the potential to change news production, even though concrete use cases are still emerging. From automated content creation and personalized recommendations to streamlining workflows and enhancing audience engagement, Generative AI will play a big role. I think, all these advancements in technology will help us build a more dynamic and responsive media industry.

The post Everything from Broadcast to Social: NDTV Profit’s Harmit Singh on the evolving media landscape appeared first on CIO Dimension.

The Generative AI (GenAI) wave is upon us. Every enterprise is buzzing about its potential, and investments are skyrocketing. But amidst the excitement, a crucial question remains: What truly separates successful GenAI projects from the rest?

In a recent visit to India, Jihad Dannawi, Regional VP – APAC, DataStax (a leading real-time vector database company) sheds light on the hidden complexities of AI projects. This exclusive interview with CIO Dimension delves into:

• The power of the right database in unlocking the true potential of Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Why developers are the backbone of GenAI and how to empower them
• India’s unique advantage in leading the GenAI revolution

Edited excerpts: 

DataStax positions Astra DB as the ‘go-to’ database for GenAI applications. Can you explain why Astra DB stands out as the best choice for GenAI applications compared to your competition?

For starters, we are a 14-year-old company that has built the most widely used enterprise-grade database. It has been delivering high scale, high performance, and high availability — even before Generative AI came in. 

We are at a stage where a lot of organizations are scaling GenAI from PoC to production. At PoC level, organizations are not looking at scale or performance. But when they move to production, they suddenly start to have performance issues. They need to be able to pull in massive amounts of data to increase the relevancy and accuracy of the models, which means that the database must be bigger.

But volume often comes in the way of performance at the production stage. When organizations move beyond entry level scenarios to more mature use cases, they need to have a database that can handle their speed, scale, and performance requirements      – all at a reasonable TCO. A lot of databases in the market struggle to balance these aspects. 

An industry benchmark clearly demonstrates that DataStax’s Astra DB Serverless (the cloud-native database service built on Apache Cassandra) significantly outperforms the competition in throughput, latency, relevance, and TCO.  

Another key offering from DataStax is RAGStack, which claims to reduce the complexity associated with Gen AI for developers? Could you elaborate? 

When it comes to generative AI, one of the key issues that the developer community faces – especially when they start building the big stuff for production – is that they don’t know where to start. Because there are so many components and tools available in the market, it’s hard to decide what to use –  especially when dealing with vector databases.   

That’s why DataStax built a layer for the developers called RAGStack. This helps them build production-grade retrieval augmented generation (RAG) Gen AI applications in a simpler and faster way – without the developers having to learn everything from      scratch. It’s fully open source, connected and improves developer productivity significantly. It drastically simplifies the process of implementing RAG – the process of providing context from outside data sources to deliver more accurate LLM query responses. 

RAGStack is part of our vision is to enable and empower developers to build GenAI applications in production more efficiently. We are helping developers and companies to quickly innovate.  Developers do not come with AI skills; they don’t know how to build LLMs. We firmly believe that the GenAI journey of an organization starts from the developer, and not the AI team. With RAGstack, they can start right away, without waiting to acquire new skills. 

Another major concern that organizations must deal with is the AI hallucination. How is DataStax working to ensure fewer hallucinations? 

Hallucination, or in other words the “context” for an LLM, is the tricky bit. Now technology allows you to launch GenAI very quickly, but GenAI is not always accurate. This is why retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is so important for enterprises building GenAI applications. They must be able to augment an LLM with relevant, up-to-date data so it can provide relevant, factual responses.

More data means better context. And this will also bring in the big competitive differentiator into the models and the eventual outcomes for businesses. This further emphasizes the point that many databases in the market that claim to be vector do not have the capacity to perform high volume data. 

Can you share some examples of how Astra DB has helped customers achieve significant business outcomes?

Through Astra, we have started to discover a lot of customers with smaller needs, who can move very quickly through the GenAI journey. When customers begin to deploy impactful GenAI in their business processes, we believe that we stand to gain.  

A great case in point is Skypoint, the Portland-based Gen AI healthcare company. They leverage Astra DB’s vector search to enhance their services, offering users real-time, contextual, and personalized AI agent solutions. 

Another key customer for us is India’s leading edtech player, Physics Wallah. This unicorn’s app has over 15 million downloads as of January 2024. Its personalized AI bot is built on Astra DB and assists students with their academic and support queries in a personalized manner. The database’s stability helped the company handle 50x traffic increase with zero downtime during a live demo with 1 million students.  

A lot of organizations are still in the experimentation stage. Our study shows that only 4% of GenAI projects have moved to production, so we are in the absolute beginning of the wave, a lot of the     projects in PoC will move in     to production this year.      

India’s GenAI market is predicted to reach a massive $17B by 2030 and India is reportedly ahead of the US in AI adoption by businesses. What will be the catalysts for this growth and what are DataStax’s plans to capitalize on this opportunity?

AI will impact the top line and bottom line of every business out there. India has a strong community of developers and GenAI starts with developers. So, India has the skills and the mass to innovate and drive more use cases. They      also have the right mindset – the ecosystem here loves to build and that’s a very positive mindset to have when it comes to AI. Because AI is not something you buy and turn on, it’s something you build. And with the right mindset, India will be faster to innovate. The GenAI wave is poised to trigger a paradigm shift, comparable to the impact of mobile and web technologies. India has the skills, capacity and the mindset to really benefit.  

From a DataStax point of view, India is a big market and we are definitely investing here. We are expanding our team to meet to the growing needs.  

The post India’s developer strength to drive GenAI advantage: DataStax’s Jihad Dannawi appeared first on CIO Dimension.

When Mitali Biswas left her highly fulfilling role at IBM to become the CIO of a leading hospital in Kolkata, she was led solely by her conviction. Four years later, after successfully navigating the COVID-19 crisis which came along rather unexpectedly, she has embraced the role of a CIO with all its virtuosity. 

The secret sauce is her inside-out approach to digital transformation with a firm focus on impactful outcomes. She is the sort of a technology leader who has seen the best of transformation programs globally and yet champions a more grounded approach while crafting a technology roadmap at CK Birla Hospitals. 

In this exclusive video interaction, Mitali takes us through her fascinating journey as a healthcare CIO and how the sector is set to transform itself with the help of AI, IoT, wearables and other technologies. 

The CK Birla group of Hospitals comprises esteemed institutions such as the Calcutta Medical Research Institute (CMRI), a premier multispecialty hospital located in Kolkata, alongside the renowned BM Birla Heart Research Centre in Kolkata and the Rukmani Birla Hospital in Jaipur. With a rich legacy spanning over 50 years, these hospitals have collectively provided care to more than 1.8 million patients.

Mitali believes that AI has the ability to revolutionize the healthcare sector and save more lives. 

“AI has potential to significantly transform the clinical decisions support systems, by helping doctors diagnose faster and more accurately using data. Radiology imaging is emerging as a strong use case today. Imagine AI being used to accelerate the diagnosis process of brain strokes using MRI images – we will be able to save a lot more lives this way,” she says. 

She discussed some key roadblocks to AI adoption in healthcare from an Indian context. “In healthcare, we are dealing with human lives and there must be the trust and evidence that the AI systems are 100 percent right. That’s the reason why acceptance and change management remain the biggest challenges.” 

Mitali also highlights some key challenges in implementing AI in healthcare including the prevalence of manual processes, and the data management & data sharing issues that CIOs face. “It’s important to get the entire ecosystem in the healthcare sector to work together. Government plays a key role here. I think we are heading in the right direction with the help of Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission. Enforcement is the need of the hour,” she underscores.  

Watch the full video to learn more about the emerging use cases of IoT and wearables in healthcare and a lot more interesting insights from Mitali. 

The post Healthcare AI has the power to save more lives: Mitali Biswas, CIO, CK Birla Hospitals  appeared first on CIO Dimension.

In November 2021, when IBM spun off its infrastructure services to create ‘Kyndryl’, there were quite a few naysayers. Many called it the unshackling of an unwanted part of the business with declining revenues and earnings. Two challenging years down the line, Kyndryl seems to have done a lot of things right. It’s third quarter fiscal 2024 earnings stand as a testimony. 

It beat Wall Street’s expectations, cut its losses by 50% and raised full-year outlook, increasing its stock value by more than 12%. Its 10% revenue decline is attributed to the strategic exit from zero-margin, low-margin revenue streams. At the time of spinoff, about 40% of its contracts were reportedly making little or no profit. 

In Q3 FY24, the company reported double digit growth in its consult revenue, indicating a strong growth in high-margin services. It’s clear that Kyndryl is shedding businesses that added little or no value, and becoming more focused towards areas where it sees higher margins and potential for growth. 

Quite understandably, it was an uphill battle to turn things around, says Karen Forbes, Vice President – Global Go-To-Market and Customer Advocacy at Kyndryl, during her recent visit to Bangalore. 

CIO Dimension caught up with Karen to know more about Kyndryl’s transformation journey. 

Edited excerpts: 

It’s been over two years since the spin off and it’s been a mixed bag, which is not a surprise after a big spin like this. How would you summarize the last two years of Kyndryl’s journey? 

It has been a big journey for us to embed the brand in the market as we stand alongside some of the giants. We had to build a services company that was unshackled by a product company. Two years down the line, we can say with conviction that we are not a legacy spinoff losing money. Our business results clearly project that now. Besides, we are in the new areas of market, we have built new practices and capabilities and are growing those capabilities in our customers. 

Our leadership had two key mandates for us during this massive transition. The first one is to look after our customers, most of whom agreed to stay with us. Secondly, we decided to retain every employee and give them the confidence to come across. Our leadership has done a fantastic job in steering us through that journey.

Two years ago, when the spin was announced, I don’t think many people were placing the bets on us. There was a lot of cynicism out there. But what we achieved in two years is phenomenal and each of us is proud of it. 

Preparing an organization with about 85,000 employees worldwide during a transformation of this scale is not a small feat. What are your learnings? 

The cultural journey has been challenging because we are changing hearts and minds. We were focusing on building confidence among our people. We spent a huge amount of time talking to them about the brand of Kyndryl, the purpose and mission of the brand. 

We created something called the ‘Kyndryl Way’ which talked about the changes we must embrace as we become a services company. For example, most of our teams on the ground never had to work with channel partners or alliances before. We had to teach many new skills to our teams and build trust because this different way of engaging with customers was not usual for us in the ‘old co’. 

The second big vector is our 3A’s strategic objectives that are at the center of our transformation, which is around Alliances, Advanced Delivery and Accounts. We have been making steady progress in all these areas. Our Alliances with tech leaders like AWS, Google and Microsoft have helped us expand our addressable market. Kyndryl Bridge platform has roughly 750 customers performing over 1 billion automations, generating annual savings of $500 million.  

Kyndryl’s hyperscaler partnerships are a significant part of your growth strategy. Tell us a bit more about these alliances. 

We exceeded our alliance revenue targets, with over $300 million generated this year and raised our full fiscal year target to $400 million. We increased our cloud-related capabilities with 38,000 hyperscaler certifications.

Clearly, there is a lot going on in the cloud space. We work with the hyperscalers to help customers understand what their cloud strategy must be VS leading them to a particular hypervisor.  We work together a lot to understand what we can deliver to customers around data management, Gen AI, sustainability, hybrid cloud, FinOps and much more. Some of these areas help us build relationships beyond CIOs to include CFOs, data managers among others.  As our revenue is historically shrinking, it’s important to be in those new places. 

We are also building specific solutions and reference architectures around different industries like financial services and technologies such as genAI and analytics with each of these hyperscalers. So, we are moving the partnership beyond the cloud migration aspect to larger areas. 

How are you modernizing your GTM to align with the new ways of doing things? 

We have been focusing on simplifying how we show up in front of the customer. For example, instead of having multiple specialists as multiple touchpoints, we try to be more cross-practice to solve the customers’ business problem. We start with changing the narrative by focusing on ‘Innovate, modernize and secure’. It’s kind of a flip on from being a product company where you walk in and talk about the products that you like to sell. 

We had an agreement with IBM to use their process and technology at spin. In the last two years, we completely modernized and transformed our front & back offices to “fit-for-purpose” modern IT infrastructure. This helped us consolidate over 80% of the application portfolio we inherited, from over 1,800 business applications to fewer than 360 applications. That made us more efficient and effective in the way we go to market. 

The third important part of the GTM is the skills. We continue to invest heavily on the skills of our people. People are the heart of what we do and they are our most valuable asset as a services company. 

Lastly, would you like to talk about some interesting customer stories from India and the significance of India as a market for Kyndryl? 

India is a particularly exciting market for us. Some of our key customers in India are from the banking and financial sector. A notably big win for us from this sector is Canara Bank which partnered with us to manage and transform their IT operation including the application landscape. We also work a lot of with small finance banks like Suryoday Bank for technology transformation and digital banking. NPCI is another key customer for us, helping them manage their data centers which handle up to 70 billion transactions a month. 

We have some really inspiring stories from our customers like Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India, USDC / Jain University and Dr. Lal Path Labs from India. Most importantly, what we see in India is a market where we can innovate in and scale for the rest of the markets globally.

The post We are not a legacy spinoff losing money: Karen Forbes, Kyndryl appeared first on CIO Dimension.

Way back in 2010, when agtech was a relatively alien term, India had only about a dozen startups in this segment. Bangalore-based Cropin was one among those early agtech companies in the sector. A decade down the line, amidst over 1000 agtech startups, Cropin still remains the cream of the crop in the agtech space. 

Founded by two childhood friends Krishna Kumar and Kunal Prasad, the Bangalore-based company indeed had very humble beginnings. As agtech is all set to take centre stage, Cropin has traversed a long way to truly become a name to be reckoned with. 

This B2B player has digitized over 16 million acres of farmland, empowering over 7 million farmers (most of whom are smallholder farmers) to unlock the power of data and AI. Cropin Cloud, which the company says is the world’s first industry cloud for agriculture, provides predictive intelligence for over 200 million acres of farmland worldwide. Its investors include names like Google, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, JSR Corporation and ABC Impact among others. 

CIO Dimension caught up with Sujit Janardanan, Chief Customer & Marketing Officer of Cropin, to talk about Cropin’s story, its vision and the way forward. 

Watch the full interview here: 

Much of the company’s growth, says Sujit, can be attributed to its conscious decision to pivot away from being a point-solution provider to an ecosystem player. “Our vision is to be the backbone of the agriculture ecosystem, similar to how SWIFT is for the banking ecosystem or Amadeus for the flight booking ecosystem,” he adds. 

Cropin Cloud is a big leap in that direction. This platform envisions to bring in various stakeholders in the agricultural ecosystem – including startups who build agtech solutions and help them co-innovate. “This enables us to collectively unlock the value faster and deliver impact to businesses and farmers as soon as possible,” says Sujit. While Cropin has already helped seven million farmers, globally there are over 500 million farmers who can potentially benefit from technology. Therefore, speed is the need of the hour for the agriculture sector. “With Cropin Cloud, we are trying to help everyone move faster,” Sujit highlights. 

In this interview, he also touches upon Cropin’s plot-level predictive intelligence capabilities and forecasting models. 

Sujit, who previously led marketing at Google, AWS and NTT, will be talking at the upcoming COP28 Dubai about ‘Digital Innovations for climate-resilient agriculture’. 

The post Here’s how Cropin is building the tech backbone for global agriculture sector  appeared first on CIO Dimension.

Hemanta Banerjee has seen it all when it comes to data, analytics and AI. In his own words, “I have been working on analytics even before it became analytics”. And for someone with over two decades of experience and expertise in the field of data, there has never been a better time than now – a time when AI is set to revolutionize pretty much everything. 

Hemanta, who now heads the Public Cloud Data Services at Rackspace Technology, believes that we are at a pivotal point in the evolution of Artificial Intelligence with Generative AI transforming the way we work. “So far, AI was more like a Black box art performed by a set of people. With Generative AI, for the very first time, an average user can understand how to apply AI in the context of the work they are doing. That’s truly revolutionary,” he says. 

Watch the full interview here: 

He believes that the classical co-pilot AI model – wherein AI works alongside the user and assists the user to be more productive – offers immense potential to businesses. And copilots go beyond just automating simple, day-to-day tasks to transform some of the most complex use-cases, he emphasizes. “For example, we deployed a ‘data privacy officer’ for a Rackspace customer. It helped the organization to effectively address all the regulatory and privacy requirements in an unprecedented way,” he explains. 

However, as Generative AI becomes an integral part of the business processes, organization must buckle down and address some of the old and new data challenges effectively. 

“There are a whole new set of challenges around model misuse, AI bias and responsible use of AI,” he says, while elaborating on some of the AI best practices and guidelines including having the right oversight framework. 

The post AI copilots will transform the future of work: Hemanta Banerjee, Rackspace appeared first on CIO Dimension.

Jira, the quintessential issue tracking tool, has become a household name among software developers since its launch in 2002. The makers of Jira – Atlassian – has come a long way in the last 20-odd years. With over 260,000 customers and 10,000 employees, the company today offers a suite of products including different flavours of Jira, Confluence, Trello, Bitbucket and Compass among others. 

Rajeev Rajan, Atlassian’s CTO, who joined the company in July last year, has an ambitious roadmap to build one of the ‘top engineering teams in the world’. While he is at it, his past experience has proven invaluable. 

Rajeev spent five years as VP and Head of Engineering for Facebook and Head of Office for Meta in the Pacific Northwest Region. Prior to that, he had long stint with Microsoft across multiple products from Exchange to SQL Server to Active Directory, and Office 365.

CIO Dimension caught up with Rajeev during his recent visit to India at Atlassian’s R&D center in Bangalore. 

Excerpts from the interview: 

You have always been a software/engineering leader in your career. How is your experience in companies like Meta and Microsoft guiding you at Atlassian and how are you doing things differently here?  

I was really attracted to the Atlassian story. For an engineer, Atlassian is an iconic engineering company. It built Jira for engineers and serves over 260,000 companies around the world. As an engineer, it was a big attraction to be part of a brand that so many engineers across the world use. 

I obviously bring a lot of best practices, as I have worked for companies that have exceptional engineering teams. I have seen good times and not so good times in both my previous companies. That has helped me identify some of the pitfalls and anti-patterns that we should avoid.

One of the things that I have done differently is to focus on developer productivity. I believe that our own engineers must become the most productive so that they can make every engineer in the world more productive. 

What are the key gaps in developer productivity that you are trying to address here? 
The definition of productivity here is not the traditional yardstick of efficiency or getting an engineer to write more lines of codes. That’s not the productivity I am looking at. It’s more about how we make an engineer feel the ‘developer joy’. As a developer, one needs to get to the ‘flow’ —  you’ll know this better as a writer. Just like writing, coding needs to have a state of flow. I have started a whole new program around developer productivity at Atlassian. The idea is to ensure that we increase developer productivity to the point that the engineers feel excited about coding.

Atlassian has grown over time and a lot of our code has acquired the characteristics of legacy, monolithic codebase. And monoliths become harder to write code in as nobody understands the whole history. That’s where we started leveraging Microservices, by splitting the architecture into smaller components. We have been doing some work in this area so that our engineers are able to move much faster. 

Building a strong engineering team has been a key focus area for Atlassian. Considering the uncertain employment landscape and other macro factors, this seems like a complex undertaking. 
Keeping a high bar on talent is non-negotiable for us. We have up-levelled our practices to ensure that the people we hire are truly world-class engineers. We have done well in attracting talent from some top tier companies. We believe that the future is remote, distributed work and our “Team Anywhere” policy has resonated really well.  

That said, we are not immune to the macro situation. So, we did pull back on some of our hiring goals globally and in India so that we can right-size the teams for the current business priorities. Mid-to-long term, we expect to hire even more as things pick up. We are going to be conscious about how we scale our growth, based on what we need for our business. 

We are a company that invests as much as 40% of our revenue back into R&D; that’s an indication of our commitment. Our global engineering team is roughly about 5,500 engineers and we still continue to hire. We have about 1000 engineers in India alone and it is one of the fastest growing R&D centers globally. 

As you rightly said, the future of work is remote, distributed and hybrid. How are some of these radical shifts influencing innovation at Atlassian? 
We use our own products for everything we do. We track issues in Jira. This plays a crucial role in making our offerings suitable for remote and hybrid work environments. We focus a lot of self-service APIs that allow developers to independently work on and contribute to different software components. That helps them not to be restrained by geographical boundaries or someone else’s work. These practices are then incorporated into our products. Atlassian Compass for example allows Atlassian developers sitting anywhere in the world to locate different components, documents, APIs and so on, which in turn helps with the ‘developer flow’ that I earlier talked about. 

Atlassian’s project tracking tool Jira is a go-to software for developers. How are your efforts to take Jira beyond the development world faring? 
Our Jira Service management suite stemmed out of the idea that IT departments work a lot like software teams. That’s how we pivoted Jira to IT departments. That’s a successful second business that we have grown. We identified similar requirements in the HR, legal and finance departments. That’s how we made the Jira Work Management for all. Our mission is to help unleash productivity in all kinds of teams and we believe that Jira has a universal appeal. 

More critically, the knowledge worker economy is ripe for revolution. The Office 365, Google Docs or Slack or Zoom are commodity tools and often really don’t make the big difference (in productivity of workforce). Companies, on the other hand, are seeking how they can unleash the productivity of knowledge workers. Especially the younger workforce that are mobile-first and are used to doing things digitally. Many of today’s office tools are simply digital versions of the analogue processes. In the new world, we need digital-first ways of doing things. And that’s the space that Atlassian is innovating in. 

You alluded to the changing definition of developer productivity earlier. Does AI have a role in accelerating that shift? How is Gen AI going to change software development from here on? 
AI is going to change everything. It’s as big a change that I have seen in my lifetime in technology – just like the revolution led by iPhone and previously Internet. Developers are already using coding assistants. They don’t have to write everything from the beginning on a code editor. A lot of mechanical and repetitive work is being done by Generative AI. Coding itself is changing. 

Will we reach a point where everything gets written by AI? I don’t know. 

But I strongly believe that human beings are moving up the (value) chain in terms of knowledge work. You will always need the humans to do the most intelligent and complex things. If you are an engineer writing codes, there is a lot of repetitive work that you do today. If those things are taken care of, the developers can focus on the real idea. It drastically improves their productivity. 

At Atlassian, we believe that Gen AI is truly the next revolutionary wave and we are squarely on that journey. While we have been using AI in our products, we now have the power of LLMs (Large Language Models). A few months ago, we tapped OpenAI to introduce smarter features to our products. For example, we now have a chat agent and natural language interface which allows users to use different languages while using our tools. AI’s ability understand human language is truly transformational for software engineering. 

That’s a big shift. What would this mean for today’s developers? Is this going to fundamentally change the way they look at software engineering? 
Today, a lot of coding happens at the file level. The future, which is not far away, is going to be about assembling components. Let me use Home Depot (a multinational home improvement retailer) as a case in point. They have tools and components that help you build something entirely new or remodel an existing structure. That’s exactly how software is going to be – less about writing codes and more like the Lego blocks. 

You don’t have to make everything from the scratch. If you go to any software company, almost everything is already written. Developers write some variation of it. There is a lot of effort wasted because we are not reusing. Reusable software is the future. 

There are over four million engineers in India and a lot of them are rewriting things that are already written. If we had a repository of reusable objects, we wouldn’t have to constantly rewrite software modules. Which is why I believe that the  low-code, no-code revolution is very powerful. Coding is not something only coding engineers should understand. Getting that power to more people will be the next evolution where programming is not just a domain of some set of engineers who understand 0s and 1s in their heads. 

That’s going to be one of our focus areas going forward.      

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When Paolo Juvara joined Pure Storage in 2021, he knew he had a vastly different role to fulfill. After being the CIO of one of the largest cloud companies in the world (Google Cloud), Paolo’s role at Pure Storage as the Chief Digital Transformation was to be quite an unusual venture. 

A software developer at heart, his diverse background in both business and technology domains has helped him ace the role.

In this exclusive interview with CIO Dimension, Paolo shares his unique experiences as the chief digital transformation officer who drives Pure’s ambitious digital agenda to meet the company’s innovation and growth goals. 

Watch the full video here: 

People should be at the center of every digital transformation project 

DX is all about leveraging technology. But you really cannot succeed if you are not focusing on people and process, says Paolo. He believes that digital leaders must be empathetic towards the needs of diverse set of users. 

“If you do not involve humans to begin with, by understanding their needs and challenges, then you are not going to find the right bottlenecks – whether your goal is to improve process efficiencies or drive innovation,” he adds. One of the ways he implements this strategy is through the formation of a product management team within the DX organization.

For a company that transformed storage into an innovation technology, all of Pure’s technology and business advances are complemented by digital transformation – to greatly amplify the outcomes. The starting point of a successful transformation project, says Paolo, is often the back office. “I would say back office is the foundation of everything else in digital transformation. If operational complexities are not addressed, they start becoming a huge bottleneck for the scalability and growth of the company. My number one priority has been to focus on the back-office operations so that we can remove all the internal friction.” 

In this interview, Paolo also highlights how the traditional ways of measuring the success of DX projects are changing, the importance of employee and customers experience in such initiatives and why organizations must clearly define the business outcomes at the very outset. 

Also read:
Digital Transformation is all about questioning the status quo: Mani Mulki, Kedaara 

Pure Storage, Microsoft expand partnership to address cloud adoption challenges

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Let’s talk numbers! An astonishing 70% of digital transformation projects reportedly fail – despite it being an all-encompassing focus for enterprises for over a decade. There could be several reasons for a digital transformation initiative to misfire. But, one of the key reasons is a ‘wrong start’, says Mani Mulki, Operating Director for Technology at Kedaara Capital and one of the topmost tech transformation gurus in the industry. 

Mani has led several transformation projects during his illustrious career as a CIO, working for many iconic brands like Tata Capital, ICICI, Godrej and Pidilite. And his biggest takeaway – digital transformation is about putting process before technology. 

In an exclusive interaction with CIO Dimension, Mani Mulki lays out the complexities of digital transformation and explores where organizations go wrong. 

Watch the full video here: 

“Most often, companies fail to understand what it really takes to digitally transform. It’s very easy to get a digital landscape in place. The tough part is doing the ‘transformation’ bit. A lot of organizations that embark on digital transformation merely automate whatever they are doing currently. Very few organizations actually question the status-quo,” he says. 

From his on-the-ground experience spearheading several digital transformation projects, Mani concludes that organizations that successfully transform themselves go back to the basics and challenge the existing processes. 

Mani has successfully amalgamated some of these best-practices to his current role, where he has the larger mandate of guiding a diversified set of Kedaara’s portfolio companies – spanning across healthcare, financial services, pharma, manufacturing and consumer tech. He works with key stakeholders of these portfolio companies in devising robust technology roadmaps that aligns tightly with the desired business outcomes. 

“I am pleased to be able to move into an influencer’s role from an operational role,” he says. 

And that’s perhaps a natural transition that every CIO seeks to make, in order to create a larger impact both within and outside the organization. 

As someone who has closely witnessed the evolution of the CIO role, Mani believes that the CIO role will disappear before long. In its stead, something more powerful will emerge. “IT was a complex function a few years ago and that’s what lent that complex credibility to the CIO or CTO title. With the advent of Cloud and other models, the use cases are more important than the technology itself. The role of a CIO or CTO will hence diffuse into that of a ‘chief transformation officer’ and the potential for that is going to be massive,” he sums up. 

Also watch:

Innovation talk: Muralidharan Ramachandran, Tech Evangelists & CIO of Startek

Shweta Srivastava, Head – IT Applications, JK Cement on the impact of LCNC on app development

Maheswaran S, Country Manager, Varonis, on shifting to data & user-centric security

The post Digital Transformation is all about questioning the status quo: Mani Mulki, Kedaara Capital  appeared first on CIO Dimension.

Much before business became technology and vice versa, the CIO was just the custodian of technology. IT departments were the slow-moving bureaucratic lot. But CIOs and their teams have travelled quite far from that point. Today, CIOs are acting as key business strategists, helping businesses transform and grow. 

Meet a CIO, who also successfully led several business roles, including that of a CEO of a multinational firm’s India business –  Muralidharan Ramachandran.

This former CEO of Atos India offers a handful of lessons on what it takes to be the “CEO of your own career” (to borrow his own words).

In this exclusive interaction with CIO Dimension, Murali explores some key aspects that today’s CIOs must consider, including the changing talent scenario, new opportunities around digital transformation and also on working with startups. 

Watch the full video here: 

Before becoming the CEO of Atos India, Murali worked as the CIO of Syntel (later acquired by Atos) for over 8 years. He also moved onto other responsibilities as vice president later during his stint at Syntel, in the areas of quality assurance and cybersecurity. Before moving out of Atos in 2022, Murali became the vice president of Growing markets for the company’s key services. 

In his two-decade long leadership journey of great diversity, Murali has acquired the rare skill of striking the balance between technology and business.

He believes that the biggest challenge for a CIO going forward will be to ‘filter out the noise’ amidst the overwhelming technology options. “Today you have the option to choose any technology that you want. But the tricky part for CIOs will be how they can take the whole organization along in the journey and manage change. CIO will need to be a big ‘change-manager’ rather than being a hard-core technologist” he says. 

In this conversation, Murali also takes us through the evolving talent landscape where the industry transitioned from the traditional SDLC models to agile methodologies and how it drove a big change for tech leaders. He explains why the current mass layoffs in the tech sector are a result of imprudence and why companies need more sustainable models for talent acquisition and management. 

He believes that a CIO’s digital investments will be strictly evaluated based on the four fundamental business criteria – revenue growth, cost optimization, customer experience and regulatory challenges. “The CIO has to choose her battles wisely,” he sums up. 

The post ‘CIOs must not get too enamored by technology’: Muralidharan Ramachandran  appeared first on CIO Dimension.