Career Track
How long at your current company
I joined India Infoline in August, 2009. Before that I was the
CEO of Future Bazaar, for three years.
Most important career influencer
Early in my career, Girish Kulkarni of TDA Capital Partners
acted as my mentor and guide. More recently, Kishore Biyani
significantly influenced my thinking and gave me new
opportunities.
Decision I wish I could do over
I wish I had gone to Silicon Valley in the 1990s instead of
joining IBM India. Many of the key paradigm innovations happened in
Silicon Valley during that time, and the entire web industry was
created. I was based in Bengaluru and participated in it only
second hand.
Vision
The next big thing for my industry will
be
I see more automation coming in on the development front.
Traditionally we throw people at a problem. We try to solve a
problem with more people and low budgets. We employ programmers who
write all the code from scratch. We sparingly use best-in-class
tools that are available to speed up development. I see a lot of
automation coming in.
We need to move to a world where automatic generation of large
chunks of code will boost the productivity levels of our
programmers. Today, we’re handcrafting software—we need
to move to the industrial age. Also, platform APIs such as Google
App Engine or Salesforce Cloud with builtin APIs will change our
approach to programming. People will stop writing bare code and
concentrate on tying services together.
Advice for future
CIOs
Build enough ability to understand
business problems
Look at the cost benefit or ROI of the business, not of the
technology
Prepare for the role of strategist
On The Job
My favorite project
My favorite project is still ongoing. We are trying to build a
new version of our internal trading platform (Trader Terminal).
Favorite milestone
I crossed my favorite milestone at Future Bazaar in 2008 when we
achieved a turnover of Rs 100 crore. In 2006, we estimated that the
e-commerce market in India was worth Rs 1,000 crore and we aspired
to grab a chunk of it. But our estimates were wrong and the number
of Internet users failed to increase at the expected rate.
We realized that achieving the target revenue would be far more
challenging than anticipated. Hence, Rs 100 crore was quite an
achievement for us and it made us the largest e-commerce
company.
Other top initiatives
Moving to the cloud: We moved our e-mail and some
of our production applications to the cloud. Earlier, a substantial
portion of our support calls were related to e-mail. There were
many failure points with our internal messaging. It was a dramatic
improvement when we went to Google. We encouraged people to chat,
to use calendar, to use the Groups feature in Google mail.
How I measure IT
effectiveness
IT is most effective when it is invisible. A washing machine has
a lot of technology and processor power built in, but nobody thinks
about it. And that’s how IT should be within an organization.
When I joined the current organization, we had many challenges
related to the management of IT.
We used to spend an hour discussing IT issues during every
quarterly review meeting (QRM) of the company. I was asked to make
this zero minutes, and we managed. We have not discussed IT in the
last two QRMs.
CIO Unplugged
Leisure activities
I read and do a lot of cycling within the city on weekends.
Unknown talents
I cook Bengali and Lucknowi food.
If I weren’t a CIO ,I'd
be…
A travel writer penning travel guides.