From Blue To Magenta

Have you ever been in a great holiday location and longed for that moment to keep going? Invariably, reality soon catches up and you need to move on. Likewise, I have always believed that all amazing things come to an end so that the next set of amazing things can begin!

After 13 years of great people, big opportunities, successful product releases and happy customers, it's now the time for me to move on from SAP. I am really grateful for the amazing time I had at SAP with excellent colleagues, mentors and managers in building great products and keeping customers happy.

KMC, BPA, DUET, ES, POA SBC, BUI, IPB (aka DID), CEM, SERIES-DATA, PDMS - with the fondness for acronyms in true SAP style, these are the projects that I worked on during the last 13 years (some of them shelved and some of them saw the light). The highs were building the flagship IoT predictive maintenance product (on-premise and cloud) and taking it to market with successful customer adoption, the rare opportunity to work on products whose technology stack spanned middleware (BPA, DUET, ES) to user interface (BUI, FCP) to programming databases (SERIES-DATA) and finally, end to end business applications (IPB, CEM, PDMS), few patent grants, winning the worldwide SAP Developer Challenge Hackathon, the enriching leadership education at Harvard Business School, moving to Germany and expanding my cultural awareness of working with teams across the globe. Being the eternal optimist, there weren't that many lows but one thing that stands out were the innumerable re-organisations that I went through resulting in frequent change of managers during my initial years.

One thing that SAP taught me over the years is - own your career and take charge of it ! As the saying goes, "luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity", I have always prepared myself to take up bigger and exciting challenges in terms of new roles and the opportunities just landed at the right time. I am also grateful to my mentors and managers who believed in my potential and entrusted me with bigger responsibilities without any discussion of age or prior experience coming in the way.

My heartfelt thanks to many excellent colleagues, mentors and managers who helped me become better over the years through our interactions. Few folks who had a profound impact on my career at SAP are Bhaskar for inspiration to become a hands-on technical architect, Kalyan for instilling the thought of patenting novel stuff, Pasu and Prashant for the freedom and encouragement which shaped the way I managed people later on, Sathiya for supporting my transfer to Germany, Kai for inspiration to become a hands-on technical manager, Cyrille for mentoring and amplifying my solution architecture skills, Dean for sparking my interest back to fundamentals of computer science and expand my critical thinking, Alan for entrusting me with the global head of engineering role, Sundar & Raju for being around all the time as both friends and colleagues and Bill for inspiration to be a tenacious and empathetic leader.

I am joining Deutsche Telekom in the Technology & Innovation board area in supporting their cultural transformation journey to become a world-class innovative, agile and nimble organisation.

We have delivered great products, made lot of revenue and kept our customers happy but at the end of the day I have realised that all that matters are the people whom you work with. The thoughtful farewell gift (the Buzz Magenta plant) that I received speaks volumes about my wonderful colleagues at SAP.

I will definitely miss you folks at SAP and I am looking forward to making many new relationships at DT.