Forbes India - Tech Conversations

Our guest today is Rajeev Shah, co-founder and CEO of Celona, a Silicon Valley company specialising in the field of 5G wireless-based private cellular networks for enterprise customers. Rajeev has spent more than 20 years working on wireless communications technologies. With Celona, founded in 2019, he is equipping businesses with their own 5G-based private cellular networks—from industrial wareho...

Low-code software development has been around for several years. So has the idea of the ‘citizen developer,’ a term which the business technology consultancy Gartner is said to have coined. After the Covid-19 pandemic, however, they have become truly relevant. In this conversation, from earlier in December 2021, Leonard Langsdorf, CTO of Digital Innovation Labs at Wipro’s Capco, talks about why th...

Mark Papermaster wears multiple hats within AMD, where he is chief technology officer and executive vice president and in the semiconductor industry and forums such as the IEEE. Papermaster is one of the people credited with AMD’s turnaround over the last decade—a turnaround for which CEO Lisa Su became a widely acclaimed business leader. In this conversation from November 2021, Papermaster talks...

As the world prepares for the cloud, technology has become central and strategic to banking—not just an enabler. New financial products, like buy now pay later, as well as new fintech partnerships via open APIs, are becoming all the rage. Traditional banks find themselves seeking a fine balance between not losing out on the opportunity and running up a roster of defaulting consumers. In this conve...

Ericsson is one of the world’s biggest telecom equipment makers, supplying gear to more than half of the world’s telecom operators rolling out 5G networks. The Swedish company has had a presence in India since 1904. Today, it has more employees in India than at home—spanning operations and R&D. In this conversation, from October 2021, Magnus Ewerbring, Ericsson’s CTO for Asia Pacific, speaks a...

Tata Consultancy Services’ software engineering prowess is well known. CEO Rajesh Gopinathan, however, is on a mission to get the rank and file of the half-a-million-strong organisation to see themselves from a different perspective. In this conversation, from September 2021, Rajesh, one of the youngest CEOs in the Tata Group, did some impressive plain speaking about what needed to change within T...

Shekhar Kirani couldn't have imagined that a little Chennai outfit called Freshdesk (now Freshworks), started by a couple of nondescript engineers, would go on to deliver Accel's first US IPO from its Indian portfolio—and an Indian-founder-led software products company at that. In this conversation, from September 2021, Kirani talks about standing on the floor of the Nasdaq stock exchange, thinkin...

In September 2021, Girish Mathrubootham and co-founder Shan Krishnasamy made corporate and tech history in India with their company Freshworks becoming the first SaaS venture started by Indian entrepreneurs to list on the Nasdaq. In this conversation, from February, Girish talks about marrying the art of Indian entrepreneurship with the science of building billion-dollar businesses in Silicon Vall...

Atlassian's team collaboration software is used by customers around the world. And a little over three years ago, the Nasdaq-listed Australian tech company set up its third global R&D centre — in Bangalore. In this conversation, from August 2021, Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and co-CEO, talks about how Atlassian has grown through the pandemic and plans ahead for the India centre,...

Indegene, when it started more than 20 years ago, was ahead of its times in trying to bring technology to 'medico marketing.' Manish Gupta—a former Infosys executive—and his co-founders persevered and built a profitable multinational business offering AI and NLP platforms to the world's biggest drugmakers. Covid-19 took the demand for the Bengaluru company's technology to a who...

In recent years, interest and investments in quantum computing have picked up considerably with technology companies, as well as national governments, committing billions of dollars to develop commercial quantum computers. In this conversation from June 2021, Heike Riel, IBM Fellow, Head of Science and Technology and Lead, Quantum, IBM Research Europe, and Gargi Dasgupta, Director of IBM Research...

Our guest today is Krishnan Ramanujam, president and head of business and technology services at Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest IT services company. In this concluding part of a two-part conversation, Krishnan talks about TCS’s strategy to build cloud ecosystems for customers—as the cloud model starts delivering much more than cost benefits—and the investments the company will need to...

Our guest today, is Krishnan Ramanujam, president and head of business and technology services at Tata Consultancy Services—India’s biggest IT services company. In this two-part conversation, Krishnan talks about TCS’s strategy to build cloud ecosystems for customers—in partnership with the ‘hyper scalers’ including AWS, Microsoft and Google—as the cloud model starts delivering much more than cost...

Our guest today is Abhinav Shashank, co-founder and CEO at Innovaccer. It is a Silicon Valley and Noida-based cloud software company in the health care vertical. In today’s conversation, Abhinav talks about Innovaccer’s latest funding round that saw the seven-year-old venture’s value nearly triple to $3.2 billion—from nine months ago—and the ambition to become a comprehensive platform for a proact...

Our guest today is Sakshi Chopra, a managing director at Sequoia India, focused on growth investments at the VC firm. In today’s conversation, Sakshi unpacks the firm’s Spark programme, specifically aimed at helping women founders in India and South-East Asia. The programme has selected its first cohort of 15 women founders for a $100,000 no-strings-attached grant, each, and a year-long mentorship...

Our guests today are Rohit Grover, Pradeep T, and their professor at IIT-Madras Satya Chakravarthy. They are co-founders of Aerostrovilos Energy. The name is made of two Greek words, one for air and the other that comes close to describing a turbine. The four-year-old venture has raised half a million dollars in funding and the founders hope to have their first commercial product ready in 2023

Our guest today is Awais Ahmed, co-founder and CEO of Pixxel, a space startup looking to launch a constellation of satellites. Awais and co-founder Kshitij Khandelwal are building micro-satellites at their company, to be placed in low-earth orbits. One day they hope to get into deep-space exploration as well. To begin with, their first satellite, named Anand, could be launched as early as next mon...

Our guest today is Nitin Mittal, president for technology and data at Zee Entertainment Enterprises. The rise of the OTT segment of entertainment in India is prompting every major business in the industry to accelerate its digitalisation plan and find ways of engaging its consumer base more effectively. In today’s conversation, Nitin discusses Zee’s plans for a comprehensive digital platform to pe...

Our guest today is Omer Basith, co-founder and CEO of Virtual Forest. It is an electronics design and manufacturing services provider to home appliances OEMs. In today’s conversation, Omer talks about how he and his co-founders have innovated their business model with a platform approach to serve large customers for their two-year-old venture. In the process, they are helping to replace imports of...

Our guest today is Leonard Langsdorf, CTO of Digital Innovation Labs at Capco, a Wipro company. Low-code and no-code software development has been around for several years. So has the idea of the 'citizen developer', a term which the business technology consultancy Gartner is said to have coined. After the Covid-19 pandemic, however, they have become truly relevant. In today's conversation, Langsd...

Our guest today is Vishwastam Shukla, chief technology officer at HackerEarth, a Bangalore and Silicon Valley company that offers a tech platform for developers and companies to find each other. In today’s conversation, Vishy discusses HackerEarth’s ‘state of developer recruitment 2021’ report — how it’s a candidate’s market out there right now; what might happen to diversity in the short term; an...

Our guest today is Vikas Gopal, global managing partner, finance and shared services consulting lead at Tata Consultancy Services. TCS, one of the world’s biggest IT services companies, found that many finance leaders in companies around the world relied more on instinct than on data, in a survey of 750 such senior executives. In today’s conversation, Vikas discusses some of these findings and the...

Our guest today is Mike Proulx, VP and Research Director at Forrester, which advises enterprises around the world on their business technology strategies. Mike offers his analysis of Jack Dorsey’s somewhat abrupt departure from Twitter, and the choice of Parag Agrawal, the company’s CTO, as the new CEO. Crypto, metaverse, and bringing GenZ to the platform are going to be some of the challenges Twi...

Our guests today are Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal of Meesho. Their unicorn company is in the news for all the right reasons. They are taking social commerce to small-town India and in the process, are helping millions of women turn into micro-entrepreneurs. Investors love them and privately value their company at $5 billion. Today, Vidit and Sanjeev talk about the work ahead and how they are a...