CxO Of The Week: Shankar Roddam, Chief Operating Officer, Subex

CiOL has chosen Shankar, Chief Operating Officer, Subex, CxO Of The Week. The CxO is responsible for Sales, Marketing, Engineering and Delivery. He comes with extensive international experience and ability to scale businesses in highly competitive environments, particularly around the SaaS space.

Being an active participant and contributor of startup forums such as iSpirit, SaaSX, he is also an investor in startups in the areas of Sports, IT Infrastructure and Education. He is involved in being a mentor to many organizations by being their director.

Your top priority while making decisions to improve tech infra in your organization?

My top priority while making any decision related to technology is that it should contribute to a minimum of two or more of the following areas – Agility, Extended Collaboration, Sustained Differentiation and Business Growth.

Inspiring CxO: Vivek Tiwari, Satya MicroCapital Limited

Challenges you face in driving digital transformation?

Digital transformation is happening at a rapid pace. Enterprises which are at various stages of Digitisation are adopting diverse approaches to maintain it. The biggest challenge for an Enterprise is to know that what worked for one Enterprise may /may not work for them. The second biggest challenge for them is to realize that Digitisation is only the means and not the end goal and that the original purpose and objectives of Digitisation should never be compromised.

Do you feel that freshers in the industry come with only basic knowledge but don’t have the right skills to fulfil job requirements? If yes, your suggestion to students and colleges?

Freshers today are much better equipped to accept failure, which allows them to take risks early on in their career without having to worry about how their failure would be interpreted. This is due to how the industry at large has learnt to better accept failure as a stepping stone to success. Also, freshers come with no influence or bias on how the rest of the world operates which helps in bringing independent and fresh perspectives to solve problems as well as identifying potential opportunities. Students should never lose the freshness in their thinking.

What’s your mantra to become successful in life?

The mantra to become successful is to be happy and pursue that which keeps you and people around you happy. Whatever you do always give it your best shot like there is never going to be a second chance and also try being honest to yourself.

What would you like to give back to the society?

The ability to survive and sustain. We should also learn to give it back to the society.

Your favourite book and what are you reading now?

Meaningful by Bernadette Jiwa

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

Spending time with family, hearing pitches from young Entrepreneurs and watching movies

Achievements (Awards & Recognitions)

My work, commitment and contributions are my awards. My team & people who have worked with me are my recognition. But if I had to go deeper regarding achievements there was a time when I had played a critical role in the launch of CrunchMetrics, a new brand within Subex, within my first few months of joining the organisation. Also, when I was with Plivo, which is a Y-Combinator incubated startup in the Cloud Communications space, I had to play a key role in growing the company revenue by over 160% in 2 years and had built a successful sales team across US & India that grew from 2 to 27.

Experience

I have 22 Years of experience in Customer facing roles with over the last 10 years being in various senior functional and regional Leadership roles.

First Job - Had Started as a Sales representative at Mahindra Network Systems, selling EDI services to Enterprises in Maharashtra

Education - I hold a bachelors in Electronics & Telecommunications Engineering as well as a bachelor’s in mathematics & Statistics. Following this, I also pursued a Post-Graduation in Management with a specialisation in Sales & Systems.

Take a look at the previous CxO of the Week