Meet Prasad, the c-suite exec who’s democratizing enterprise software selection
For many years in the business world, picking software and technologies for the whole company to use was the dominion of one c-suite executive: the chief information officer. But as the world moved into the era of participatory consumption, where the users of products and services have strongly held views about their choices, software picked by the suits didn’t quite go down well on the front lines.
In mid 2016, Prasad Ramakrishnan, then the CIO of US-based CRM provider Veeva Systems, had an IT infrastructure problem he had to solve. The company was looking to overhaul its systems. As the CIO, Prasad just had to evaluate the different ITSM tools and decide which one he should deploy. But Prasad, wary of users rejecting software, had other plans.
He took a more democratic approach to selecting software and allowed employees– would be users–to decide which tool they wanted to work with. (His team voted for Freshservice, the ITSM tool from the Freshworks suite, and that eventually brought Prasad to Freshworks…but more on that later.)
At a time when the norm was for C-suite executives to make decisions for employees, Prasad took a fresh bottom-up approach to solving business problems. He put the power of choice in the hands of users, an approach that is now gaining traction.
Indeed, Prasad is a quintessential trend-spotter and trendsetter.
As a young adult, he chose to study computing at a time when computer science was just a fledgling sector in India. A couple of decades later, he became a spokesperson and champion of sorts for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) even as cloud software was just about developing into a concrete industry. Today, he’s helping one of the world’s trendiest cloud software companies, Freshworks, serve up and scale an integrated customer engagement platform.
As Freshworks continues to scale rapidly from a single-product company to a platform comprising a suite of customer engagement solutions, Prasad is charting the company’s IT strategy.
The birth of the engineer
Growing up in a conservative south Indian family in central Chennai (then Madras) in the early 70s, science and math—and by extension—engineering, is ingrained in Prasad. His father, one of the forces behind shaping Prasad into who he is today, has ensured that engineering and hands-on work has been part of Prasad’s daily life since childhood. The family, for instance, would never call a handyman to help with plumbing or electrical work. They’d do it themselves, and Prasad grew up around tools and mechanical equipment.
“I used to make models using blocks and cardboard. I would build houses, bridges…” says Prasad, clad in a simple half-sleeved check shirt and trousers. He was reminiscing about his childhood days, sitting in his cabin at the Freshworks office now located just a few miles away from the ancestral house where he grew up.
It was during these years that the “problem-solver” in him began to surface, by way of building things and thinking through problems.
He believes that everything—from his childhood playtime activities to conversations with classmates in college to his work as an engineer early in career—has helped shape him into what he is today. “It is all muscle memory,” he emphasizes.
In college, where he studied mathematics, a class on ‘computer oriented numerical methods’ was his favorite. A professor of his gave him a peek into the possibility of using computers to solve data and mathematical problems, and Prasad was smitten.
This was his segue into computers and IT. He registered for a master’s degree in computer applications, a program that was newly introduced in India in 1986. Upon graduating, Prasad joined Indian IT services firm Wipro, marking his official entry into the world of software. The $180 billion IT services industry in India was only just taking off in those days and Wipro was an early mover that hoovered up talent from across the country.
Prasad identifies with three broad segments or phases in his 30-year career—starting from the then in-vogue C++ programming, building and developing products, and then consulting for large businesses. Along the way, he also moved to the US.
In fact, one can visualize his career graph much like the 90s computer game Super Mario that revolves around the main character navigating challenges to move from one level to the next—winning laurels along the way. Incidentally, this is quite similar to his father’s story – his father climbed the ranks from a typist/clerk to becoming the general manager of an insurance company, Prasad says. “Our favorite father-son moments were the times he would recount how he grew in his career, against all odds, in a society where the competition was intense.”
The level that followed for Prasad after his move to the US was that of managing people and clients rather than just writing code. “By then I figured that I’m more passionate about managing people and customers. So I moved from core development to client management,” Prasad says.
During the peak of the dotcom boom in the US, Prasad traveled extensively on various consulting assignments, helping companies set up offices and manage their digital transformation. He also helped organizations solve their tech challenges using past expertise—call it his muscle memory at work.
“When you have a problem that is described to you, what makes one engineer different from another engineer is your muscle memory, and how you’re able to relate the problem to something that you have done before.”
And then, in 2010, the dotcom bubble burst. So Prasad shifted gears a bit: he began working as a business analyst and honed his skills in sales, marketing, finance, SOX, vendor management, and data warehousing, among others. The stint set him up for his current role at Freshworks. A C-suite executive needs to “have gotten his hands dirty with multiple tasks” even if he specializes in just one, he avers.
The emergence of the SaaS evangelist
By the early 2000s, Prasad was a seasoned IT professional, and the industry, too, was on the cusp of change. Big data was all the rage and companies were starry-eyed over the potential and promise of data analytics. And just around then, Salesforce.com had introduced the concept of cloud-based software.
While the SaaS model had a lot of promise, and was undoubtedly lighter on the balance sheet, companies chained to legacy, on-premise IT systems discovered that shifting to SaaS was no picnic.
Prasad fixed this.
He realized that the inertia wasn’t because of any flaws in the model. It meant changing how people approached new technology—and companies were hesitant. So Prasad found a smart way to get them to switch from on-premise software to SaaS: he advised them to take one step at a time rather than overhaul the entire infrastructure in one go.
From speaking at industry conferences to writing about it extensively, Prasad evangelized SaaS in a way never done before. His unique ways of getting companies to think differently about their software needs brought scores of companies on to the cloud—and also won him several awards.
It was during one of these projects, when he was the head of IT at education company HotChalk, that Prasad had his first brush with Freshworks and became a Freshworks customer.
From Freshworks customer to Freshworks CIO
Then, in 2015, while Prasad was conducting his bottom-up experiment at Veeva, allowing his employees to choose the software they wanted to use, he found himself quite often at the Freshworks office.
And once Veeva deployed Freshservice, he saw its productivity, collaboration, and internal customer satisfaction levels shoot up.
“I had a chance to meet the leadership team here, I’ve come to the office as a customer, and that’s when Girish said why don’t you come on board and become our CIO,” Prasad says, as he strides past a row of conference rooms and towards his cabin. Following him around the office leaves me panting. Tall, at over 6ft, Prasad practically runs when he wants to get from one part of the workplace to another. An active sportsman during his younger days, Prasad once injured his knee during a game of football, and has had to keep off sports ever since. “The only way I can get my heart rate up is by walking fast. So I can walk at 4.7- 4.8 miles per hour. That’s the way I compensate.”
Back at his cabin, Prasad talks about how and why he decided to take Girish’s offer and move to Freshworks.
“The company has scaled, and there was an opportunity to scale our internal systems needed to run the business efficiently,” Prasad pointed out. And that’s what he is here to do.
Citing the rapid growth statistics of SaaS—industry studies say that by 2021, more than 95% of companies will be in a SaaS-based environment compared to 70% today—he says, “The shift to the cloud is real.” And as companies continue to put the onus of managing their IT infrastructure on the SaaS provider, Prasad envisions setting up a framework that allows Freshworks “to experience greater growth.”
“We are in the process of deploying the infrastructure for the future. The complexity of the way we record and report transactions, the level of sophistication needed in the systems…that’s what we are the process of building,” he says.
This, of course, isn’t as simple as it sounds.
As more and more business applications get deployed in the SaaS model, there is an increasing need for them to work more smoothly with each other. “Now what is going to become critical in this new ecosystem is the ability for these applications to talk to each other…If SaaS applications work in silos, they will cease to exist in the market,” he explains.
Prasad is of the belief that companies should now have a rich application programming interface (API), and that software should be open, scalable, and expandable.
“The nice thing at Freshworks is that we have gone in with an open, API-first mentality—and that is what is going to carry us many, many years into the future,” says Prasad.
Marketplace developers, he says, can now build applications and extensions using Freshworks’ rich APIs. “We now have a seamlessly integrated framework using which we are able to have different constituents of the IT infrastructure talk to each other.”
Prasad is also helping take Freshworks to a point where all processes are repeatable and auditable. “When the street says, ‘Tell me how much money you’ll make,’ it should be the push of a button for the CFO,” he says.
What’s more, Prasad is helping Freshworks use Freshworks. “We are the best example of how other mid-market companies and enterprise-grade companies could benefit from using our products,” he explains.
“Today,” he says, “our products deliver moments of wow to our customers. They should also start delivering moments of wow to our employee base.”
In addition, Prasad was lured by the Freshworks culture. On average, most Freshworks employees are in their twenties.
“I saw a very young, dynamic, risk-taking crowd. Take smart risks, take ownership, you’re the boss of your own destiny, all those things Freshworks lives by… are part of what I also practice.” It also greatly helped that Prasad had grown up in Chennai, India. “The fact that I know the language. I know the people, and I’ve grown up here…it’s part of my DNA already. Again, muscle memory,” Prasad says.
The persistent learner
Prasad is among those few CIOs who constantly learn to keep up with the times. His motto: “If I don’t adapt my way of thinking and my approach to problem solving, I will be left behind.”
So, what’s next for Prasad? One of the things he wants to focus on is the “need to retool the workforce.” The function of IT is changing to the extent that among the key asks for CIOs is to help redefine job roles and articulate the requirements for reskilling people.
He has always been an active learner, whether it is opting to pursue multiple part-time degrees while he was in college, seeking opportunities to work and learn about different domains, or learning to play golf once he started rubbing shoulders often with C-level executives who are typically enthusiasts of the sport.
And when it comes to skill development, Prasad goes beyond the traditional boundaries of the typical corporate executive. With a few of his peers, he is investing time in helping school and college students up skill themselves to meet industry needs.
“You need to go to the origin. So as part of my off-work activity, I spend a lot of time in schools. I’m changing the infrastructure in schools, to enable them to start getting used to the new wave of these applications. It’s about changing the way you even think about the problem.”
Prasad sees himself as a teacher some years down the line—giving back to the ecosystem and passing on his knowledge and experiences. But there’s a bonus for him as well: “I also learn a lot from the questions being asked. And I also get to build up…yes, my muscle memory.”
