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Home> Executive Track> Portraits
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| Sunny side up |
| Vijay Anand who is at the helm of Sun''s engineering team in India has scripted the successful development of many product and technologies from the Indian centre |
| Priya Padmanabhan |
| Tuesday, July 04, 2006 |
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| Ambition |
To lead a more balanced life. Long-term: Build products for the local market to make the market grow Short-term: Finding the best talent to deliver work from Bangalore |
| What I would like to change about myself |
Learn to be more patient |
| Hobbies |
Hobbies are whatever my kids play like roller-blading and Play Station |
| Best moment |
All the coincidences that have happened in my life like meeting my wife in Tucson, Arizona and getting into Sun |
| A Must Have |
Personal time |
| Worst Fears |
What do I do after this job |
| Passionate about |
Making a difference |
| Fav gizmo |
Sony Play Station 2,3 |
| Fav destination |
Kedarnath and Badrinath. These places had a lot of energy |
| Fav Book |
Thomas L. Friedman's A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century |
| What ticks you off |
When people don't own up responsibility, lack of accountability and not meeting commitments |
| A lesson for life |
Be tempered about outcomes (When the boom happens, people forget about the bad times) Think contrarian, don't always go with conventional thinking |
| Mote: |
Don't have long-term goals |
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| A man with a mission
He claims that a string of favorable coincidences have guided the way in his life and that he doesn't believe in any kind of planning - be it five-year or long-term. Such an attitude would seem antithetical in the pulsing go-getter technology race. Yet Vijay Anand, the VP and MD of Sun Microsystems' Índia engineering centre is no slacker.
Anand took the helm as engineering head in 2002, when the strength of the Indian centre was around 200. At that time, the centre did not own any technology and just did piecemeal work. Now, the centre does not just own technologies and products but is also internally acknowledged as being as good if not better than Sun's main R&D centre in the US. Over the last five years, the India Engineering Centre (IEC) has generated 220 patents.
This is no mean feat for Anand who believes that working in the technology arena demands passion. Anand has been with Sun for 10 years and believes in running the engineering centre in a start-up like mode.
“I teach people how to adapt in a large company. I firmly think that an engineer can do amazing things on his/her own, keep an individual identity and not lose it while working in a large company.”
Anand trod the routine Silicon Valley IITian route. After finishing his mechanical engineering degree from IIT Madras in 1988, he took up a short stint at Citicorp in Mumbai. Programming for a banking project got him fascinated with software. “I didn't plan anything, it just happened,” he says. This line is Anand's frequent refrain through out the interview.
By then he had also applied and received admission for a Masters degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona. By then, his love for computers prevailed and he managed to change his stream from mechanical engineering to computer science.
His Master's thesis was in File Systems, which was in demand at the time. He was invited by Carnagie Mellon University to work in a company funded by IBM in an industry-academia joint venture in 1991. This company was subsequently acquired by IBM where he worked for five years.
Anand also met his wife Geeta in Tucson, Arizona where she was pursuing a PhD in biotechnology. By 1996, Anand and his wife were tempted to move from the cold climes of the East Coast to warm and sunny California. A job offer from Sun Microsystems clinched the decision and the couple took a 20-day unplanned road trip across the USA to their new home in the Bay Area.
However, Anand did not like the initial Sun experience. Back in 1996, Sun was strong on hardware and lacked a software strategy. “ I came from a really small company while Sun was such a big company. What was also missing was the link between my work and Sun's business.”
So Anand quit after six months and joined a start-up called
NetDynamics, which was formed by Israeli entrepreneurs. Anand was responsible for transforming the product concept into reality. The company focused on web applications, which was a hot area at that time.
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By a strange yet happy coincidence, NetDynamics caught the attention of Sun and was bought over by Sun for around $180 million. Reliving those days, Anand says, “The humbling aspect of the whole experience was the realization that when a bunch of people get together with ideas, hard work and little bit of luck, they can go from 0 to $180 million. At Sun, Anand continued soon moved to e-commerce applications and built a product called Market Maker. This seemed like an entrepreneurial venture for
Anand. “I had to raise money and build a team. We had 100 engineers in the Bay Area and 40 in India. We delivered the product in nine months flat.”
His frequent trips to India on work made him decide to move back with family to
Bangalore. “It was an ideal time since Sun's partnership with AOL for the MarketMaker ended in 2001 and Sun was also deciding to ramp up in India.”
Anand took up his new role in January 2002 and since then has seen the center making rapid strides. He feels that the decision has been rewarding for him both professionally and personally. “My kids just love India and are wedded to
Bangalore.”
As a person who thrives in an entrepreneurial set-up, he doesn't find the job of manning a 1000-member engineering team daunting. “I view this as a small team. It is essentially a collection of small teams that do interesting work. Good software product teams are usually between 10-20 people. I give them freedom and flexibility and allow them to make a mark.”
They sure are. Today, the India Engineering center works on diverse areas such as software and systems management, Java, NAS and SAN storage software, application server, web server, portal server and Solaris OS.
More than banking on India for costs, Anand feels that the real value is from what he calls “the leverage effect.”
“Real value comes not from having a large team here but in influencing the ecosystem here.”
Anand's cool and introverted demeanor belies the engineering productivity gains Sun has achieved in a span of a few years. Coincidences and lack of planning do have their merits. |
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