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Podcast: Vineet Tyagi – CTO At Impetus On Big Data, Digital Transformation Startups and more

Hello and Welcome to today’s episode of CTOsAtWork.com podcast series, in this podcast series, we talk to Chief Technology Officer, Engineering Head, Product and Technology leaders from all around the world and learn from them, how they work, how they build & manage world-class technology and products, how they hire great talent and many more things.

I am your host Love Chopra and in today’s podcast, I feel really honored to introduce you to our guest who is known for his thought leadership around Bigdata and Opensource technologies and he is Vineet Tyagi.

 

Vineet has been into the IT industry from last 20 plus years, and currently, he is playing his role as Chief Technology Officer at Impetus.

 

Impetus is a software solutions, products and services company. It has more than 1700 employee globally,  Impetus is focused on creating new ways of analyzing data, It has expertise across the Big Data ecosystem including Hadoop, NoSQL, NewSQL, MPP databases, machine learning, and innovative visualization. It has also Listed in India’s top 100 ‘Best Companies To Work For’ from last 4 years in a row.

 

Vineet is expert in technology forecasting and building strategic technology plans. Vineet has managed, technology and product development investments, as large as $6 million a year and have directly led the creation and implementation of new business lines as large as $50 million a year in the space of Big Data & Digital Transformation

 

Vineet has managed the whole life-cycle of innovation from Ideation to Implementation to Commercialization; he built and managed Product teams of more than 120+ people working on the cutting edge technologies.

 

Vineet is a regular speaker on Big Data, Cloud Computing, Agile in various industry conferences, webinars, NASSCOM and various other events.

 

Vineet has done his MS in Consultancy Management from BITS Pilani and BE, Computer Science from NSIT.

 

While talking to Vineet we had many interesting learnings, here are some Vineet’s wisdom of thoughts:

  • Technology by itself is not enough, if you really want to succeed in technology world then you need to understand what context the technology will be used, and the context is the overall business situation.
  • Role of a CTO in product company and services company are very different in nature and there are different set of expectation in both kind of setups required
  • The role of a CTO in product company is more of an external facing technologists, a visionary, somebody who can really lead technology operations and get product deliver out to the market. If you really want to succeed as a Product CTO you really have to be a product & technology face of the company and visionary in managing the product operations.
  • The role of a CTO in services company is more inclined towards as a business change manager or a big thinker who can really lead by influence. And this type of CTO role has its own challenges like you cannot directly administratively command and control people but you have to influence their thought process and need to lead company’s technology vision into the right direction.
  • As part of the influencing and sharing ideas with general public and whole employee base, Vineet initiated & run few programs like OpenConnect where Vineet shares, what is happening inside the company, what’s the vision, where we are going, what the latest technologies trends currently in the world, what are the technology needs of our customers and many related things.
  • If you are a startup and your nature of the business is a mix of services and well as product, in that case, you really have to focus on the differentiation factor. You need to clearly define the differences between your service delivery and product delivery model. And it’s actually a great idea to fund your own business through certain services, and in that case, also startup really have to be focused towards their product.
  • Vineet uses an interesting technique called ‘The Future Backward’ for road mapping, idea generation purpose and understanding the future need of organization. For example “What would be the need of an organization in 2020 look like”
    “The Future, Backwards method was created to aid in widening the range of perspectives a group of people can take on understanding their past and the possibilities of their future. The entrained perspectives of people within an organization give them a limited view of the present, and such entrained patterns of past perception can determine its future. As a workshop tool, the Future Backwards method can be used to generate prompts for anecdotes, or its data points can be used in a contextualisation exercise such as …the butterfly stamped. On the whole, the output from a Future Backwards exercise gives leaders an overview of the hopes and fears of their organization, and it helps them understand which entrained patterns of past perception are influencing its future.”
  • Vineet is firm believer of Elon Musk popularised ‘First Principles: Elon Musk on How to Think for Yourself’ It says: “First Principles Thinking, which is sometimes called reasoning from first principles, is focused on breaking a situation down into its fundamental pieces and then putting them back together in a more effective way that serves your purposes. If you want to learn how to think for yourself, reasoning from first principles is one of the best ways to do it.”
    To know more about First Principles please read here in detail: https://jamesclear.com/first-principles
  • Vineet believes in celebrating every small success and as AHA moment. And he suggests that we should celebrate many AHA moments as in AHA moment for the day or AHA moment for the month or year it could be a big AHA moment of life.
  • Impetus uses many open source technologies, some of the main technologies used inside Impetus are: The core focus right now is on Big Data, Analytics, and Machine Learning, so primarily large degree open source Hadoop driven technology stack like Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Hive, Spark, Elastics Search, Flink, Scala etc.
  • Big data is all about solving the problem with data.
  • To learn Big Data technologies, student or professionals first can learn the basic concepts from MOOCs platforms like Coursera, Udacity etc. and then they can go to platforms like Kaggel and try solving the real world problem around Big Data, they can also participate in Hackathon.
  • Vineet continuously looking for great talent at various levels, who are passionate about technology, who are self-learner and self-motivated.
  • Vineet also believes in hiring freshers or intern and train them and grow them within the organization.
  • Skills required to succeed as CTO: 1. Having a passion for technology is must 2. Enrolment and alignment skills are needed to communicate their ideas 3. Got to have an opinion and the ability to take stand on your own thought & idea is also a must to have skills, otherwise, a person can not be a big thinker

If you have any questions, suggestions, feedback or ideas, please feel free to write in comment section below.

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