Prasad Patil has more than 14 years of experience across the entire spectrum of IT: operations, turnkey projects, information security certification, solution architecting, and IT strategy. He brings to the table not just technology skills, but more importantly, an extremely good understanding of the business domain, and great people management capabilities.
Presently, Prasad heads the Innovations and New Technology initiatives for the USD 15 billion Essar Group, which has diversified businesses like steel, power, energy, shipping, telecommunications, BPO, retail and EPC. He manages a team of 10 members who work under verticals like mobility, infrastructure, security, network, voice, open source, green IT and applications. His team is responsible for ideation, which when adopted by systematic planning formulates as a strategy for various business initiatives. Vendor Alliances for Technology Evaluation and Strategy are a part of his profile, included as specific tasks enabling the CTO Office.
His mentor Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar, feels that Prasad’s ability to weave together a business roadmap with the IT strategy is one of the most outstanding of the many abilities that he has. He is able to talk to the business in a language that they are able to understand and put across the value that IT brings to their table.
“Prasad heads Innovation and New Technology and is an integral part of the think-tank which creates the IT strategy roadmap for Essar. Prasad is always focused on what is the business benefit and value that technology is able to deliver, and this helps him identify relevant IT innovations and new technologies for our environment,” adds Prabhu.
He works with the business folks, understands the problems deeply and then looks for IT solutions, instead of understanding tools and then figuring out problems to solve. A quality that Prabhu acknowledges: Prasad is assertive and focused and is able to manage relationships with his seniors, peers and customers very well. Other visible qualities are good leadership skills, immense knowledge of IT technologies, clarity and objectivity in all his tasks.
CHALLENGES
The biggest challenge faced by him is to get the right technology for implementation across the group, which while being diversified in its operations, also spread across multiple geographies and contrasting cultures — which is fast expanding at an exponential growth.
PROJECTS
The major projects that Prasad was involved in were:
- Citrix Desktop Virtualization
- Centralized Exchange 2010
- SSL VPN
- Active Directory Migration from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008
- Seclore DRM
- HP Managed Print Services
- HP ePrint Solution
Prasad’s role in these projects ranged from the conceptualization of the solution based on proactive and reactive inputs, to the handover to the projects team with the statement of work, purchase order of the procure infrastructure and project plan for the implementation of the solutions.
Within his organization, Prasad received top billing for the way in which he worked with the business teams, as well as the internal IT teams, to get the ownership, and buy-in for these implementations. His timely interaction with vendors to ensure adherence to deadlines was also commended.