santhoshsram AT gmail DOT com ~ github.com/santhoshsram ~ linkedin.com/in/santhoshsram
- Building a kick-ass travel platform.
- Hmm...
- Solving interesting problems with interesting people.
- Drove the company’s product strategy and roadmap across three products - AppVizor, AppPorter & AppSwitch.
- Revised the pricing and packaging for AppVizor and developed new pricing model for AppPorter.
- Backed by data, advocated and got executive buy in for switching the company’s primary focus/investment to AppPorter. This led to increased active customer engagements, PoCs.
- Played a supporting role to the CEO in formulating the go-to market plan across the three products.
- Defined the UX for AppVizor & AppPorter.
I led product and go-to market strategy for three products in different stages of their lifecycle.
- Lead Product Manager for VIO. Drove product and go-to market strategy for release 2.5 onwards.
- Established high touch engagements with several VIO customers and helped them build large scale private clouds based on OpenStack.
- Collaborated with product marketing to plan marketing activities across 2 OpenStack summits and VMworlds, in addition to several other smaller meetups and regional OpenStack events.
- Developed the business plan and product roadmap for the Container-as-a-Service platform which was later launched as VMware Integrated OpenStack Kubernetes (VIOK).
- Defined go-to market (pricing, packaging, messaging, competitive positioning and field enablement) strategy for VIOK.
- Drove inter‐BU executive alignment on product strategy and execution.
- Developed business plan for a new operations (monitoring, logging and tracing) product to provide end-to-end monitoring and troubleshooting of modern container applications - starting from the application layer, through the container orchestration layer and all the way down to the infrastructure.
- Mentored product managers to develop product strategy, roadmap and execution plan for the containers operations product.
- Defined the product scope, content and requirements, and drove execution of multiple VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) releases.
- Drove engagement across business units (Storage, Networking, Management & Operations, Core vSphere Platform) to successfully execute on the release plan and deliver high quality VIO releases.
- Established a partner program for VIO to enable service providers to consume it, creating an additional channel for the product.
- Ran private betas for multiple releases of VIO, gathering feedback from customer deployments and incorporating them into the product.
- Delivered multiple talks in popular industry conferences such as VMworld and OpenStack Summit.
This was my apprenticeship of sorts into product management. This role helped me successfully transition from an engineer to a product manager.
- Spent a large portion of my time interacting with customers to understand their motivation for moving towards OpenStack and their challenges with using some of the existing OpenStack solutions. Information collected as a result was used by the product team (of which I was a part) to shape VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) - one of the best OpenStack distributions in the market.
- Built and delivered several product demos to potential customers.
- Created technical marketing collateral (product briefs, whitepapers, datasheets, product overview presentations) for the marketing and pre-sales teams.
- Defined product requirements for the networking, storage and operations modules of 1.0 version of VIO covering a breadth of technologies including vSphere, NSX, Virtual SAN, Virtual Volumes, vRealize Operations and Log Insight.
- Delivered several training sessions to pre-sales and tech marketing teams to help them position VIO appropriately to customers.
As an engineer in the VMkernel Platform Networking team I have worked on multiple layers of the ESXi networking stack, all the way from low level device drivers to the newest network virtualization features in NSX. Some of my contributions are listed below
- Engineered NSX vSwitch integration with OpenStack.
- Engineered NSX vSwitch control plane integration with NSX-vSphere and NSX-MultiHypervisor.
- Developed tunneling protocols for NSX vSwitch on ESXi.
- Engineered multiple features for the Virtual Distributed Switch (VMware vDS).
- Developed Receive Side Scaling (RSS) load balancing for the ESXi networking stack.
- Developed Layer 3 and Layer 2 SNMP MIBs for the ESXi networking stack.
- Maintained key parts of the ESXi TCP/IP stack including IPv6, flow table.
Worked on some exciting virtualization features that allowed me to fiddle with kernel code and eventually opened the doors into kernel development.
- Tested virtual devices including VMCI (Virtual Machine Communication Interface) and Virtual Serial Port Concentrator, on ESX/ESXi, Workstation and Fusion.
- Tested virtual networking features on ESX/ESXi.
- Developed end-to-end automation suites for uninterrupted test-execution.
- Developed kernel modules for white box testing.
- Often times have fixed bugs that I have raised.
- Tested QoS (Police, Shape, CBWFQ, BRR, GEC, Model3 QoS, LLQ) on 7200 and 7600 series routers
- Developed automation frameworks for end to end test automation.
Product Management Certification [October 2015]
Pragmatic Marketing - Foundations & Focus [May 2014]
Master of Science in Computer Science [December 2006]
Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology [May 2004]
Built and enabled a team of 3 that won the VMware Grants & Gigs grant, and drove a project funded by the grant to build a new web application to streamline operations for the AfE Support a Child program.
US 9621471 | Issued Apr 11, 2017
US 14/230186 | Filed Mar 31, 2014