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. 

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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. 

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

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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.

KaarTech, a global IT consulting company specialising in SAP and S/4 HANA implementation, has raised $30M from A91 Partners, a Mumbai-based investment firm. Gautam Mago and Kaushik Anand from A91 Partners will join the Board of KaarTech.

The investment, according to the company, aims to fuel its organic and inorganic growth across existing markets in the Middle East, the European Union and North America. 

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Chennai, KaarTech specialises in IP & Digital Services in the SAP ecosystem with expertise in discrete manufacturing, professional services automation, process manufacturing and consumer packaged goods. With a team of over 2000 employees, KaarTech has doubled its revenue in the last 24 months.

“The partnership with A91 will catapult KaarTech into an unprecedented era of expansion, propelling us towards our aspiration of going public, despite our humble bootstrapped origins. This association will bolster our ability to expand geographically and augment our services portfolio in-organically. In doing so, we aspire to be the partner of choice for customers looking for Digital Transformation journeys in SAP, Cloud ecosystem customer experience, Process Automation and Data Analytics blended with KaarTech’s core competence in Logistics, Supply Chain, Financial and Human Capital Management,” said Maran Nagarajan, CEO of KaarTech.

It is not often that we get to have a sense of accomplishment in the journey of entrepreneurship. One of those exceptional days when we experienced a sense of attainment was when A91 Partners infused $30 Million in Kaar Tech breaking the 15 year streak of bootstrapped journey – Nagarajan wrote in his Linkedin Post.

KaarTech was started by four college friends from Tamil Nadu. The company currently has operations in over 15 global locations and has executed over 2500 projects.

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Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 21.7% to total $597.3 billion in 2023, up from $491 billion in 2022, according to the latest forecast from Gartner. Cloud computing is driving the next phase of digital business, as organizations pursue disruption through emerging technologies like generative artificial intelligence (AI), Web3 and the metaverse.

“Hyperscale cloud providers are driving the cloud agenda,” said Sid Nag, Vice President Analyst at Gartner. “Organizations today view cloud as a highly strategic platform for digital transformation, which is requiring cloud providers to offer more sophisticated capabilities as the competition for digital services heats up.”

“For example, generative AI is supported by large language models (LLMs), which require powerful and highly scalable computing capabilities to process data in real-time,” added Nag. “Cloud offers the perfect solution and platform. It is no coincidence that the key players in the generative AI race are cloud hyperscalers.”

All segments of the cloud market are expected see growth in 2023. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is forecast to experience the highest end-user spending growth in 2023 at 30.9%, followed by platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at 24.1% (see Table 1).

Table 1. Worldwide Public Cloud Services End-User Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

BPaaS = business process as a service; IaaS = infrastructure as a service; PaaS = platform as a service; SaaS = software as a service
Note: Totals may not add up due to rounding.
Source: Gartner (April 2023)

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 75% of organizations will adopt a digital transformation model predicated on cloud as the fundamental underlying platform. 

“The next phase of IaaS growth will be driven by customer experience, digital and business outcomes and the virtual-first world,” said Nag. “Emerging technologies that help businesses interact more closely and in real time with their customers, such as chatbots and digital twins, are reliant upon cloud infrastructure and platform services to meet growing demands for compute and storage power.”

While cloud infrastructure and platform services are driving the highest spending growth, SaaS remains the largest segment of the cloud market by end-user spending. SaaS spending is projected to grow 17.9% to total $197 billion in 2023.

“The technology substrate of cloud computing is firmly dominated by the hyperscalers, but leadership of the business application layer is more fragmented,” said Nag. “Providers are facing demands to redesign SaaS offerings for increased productivity, leveraging cloud-native capabilities, embedded AI and composability – particularly as budgets are increasingly driven and owned by business technologists. This change will ignite a wave of innovation and replacement in the cloud platform and application markets.”

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