TheCconnects: Can you tell our readers a little about your professional journey & how did you come to your current role/position?
Ramesh Kumar Lokanayakulu: I carry slightly more than 20 years of professional experience and have performed diverse roles in the IT industry in my career span. I have worked for some big brands such as Accenture, Fidelity, Bank of America, Wipro, and ANZ also for a few start-ups including one of my failed ones in the past. Well, rather than saying I came to this role I would say this role came to me.
I was severely impacted by the Covid wave of 2021 and those self-realization moments ignited a thought of getting into entrepreneurship quite seriously yet again, I don’t want to sound philosophical here 😊. But even before that, I had a long-term plan to venture on my own sometime in the future, so it was not a surprise to the people around me. A couple of my long-term, close friends believed in me & my ideologies and we all three ventured out, so this is where we are now.
TheCconnects: Who has influenced you the most in life and why?
Ramesh Kumar Lokanayakulu: My late father has always been a big role model when it comes to my professional accomplishments. The way that he went about his work dedicatedly, the followers that he had for his quality of work, and the commitment he demonstrated had a huge influence on me. Other than him as an influencer, I get inspired by people who take serious accountability for what they have been assigned to do irrespective of their industries, titles, and roles. So for me, there are a lot of influencers around us everywhere, and how I learn from them matters the most.
TheCconnects: What are the biggest challenges you have faced in your life & how did you overcome them?
Ramesh Kumar Lokanayakulu: One of the biggest challenges was to take Auxtomate Technologies to the revenue route, there were many operational challenges that came up on that journey and one such was building the entire suite of products with 80% of young & vibrant intern/fresher team in just 6 to 7 months. I was immensely challenged to explore and implement a new collaborative working model (we call it a ‘Super Agile’ 😊), that is more effective and productive than the leading agile frameworks.
With these new ways of working, we have eliminated documentation to a great extent with no compromise on delivery, issue resolution time decreased significantly, communicating on time, people gaining domain & functional knowledge quite rapidly, cross-learning multiple tech stack, and much more.
TheCconnects: What lessons you have learned from your professional career?
Ramesh Kumar Lokanayakulu: Not just one, there were many lessons. Any professional journey is about learning day-in / day-out until we call it a day, and mine was not indifferent. One of the key lessons I learnt was to adjust the way we manage people with the evolution of generations. Until 10/12 years back, there was a lot of patience and tolerance in people who work on technology but if you take the current generation of coders they expect to grow faster, tend to explore easy ways to code, and not get too much monotonous with the routine work and many more like this.
If we accept our kids this way, why not this generation of coders let me tell you this, not many in my experience range accept this fact. In my perspective, it is a privilege and I feel highly energized leading and delivering next-gen solutions with this young crop by making the needed adjustments constantly in my career.
TheCconnects: What do you see as the biggest challenge for brands in the digital space?
Ramesh Kumar Lokanayakulu: If you get deeper into the marketing in the digital space, it’s all nothing but keyword driven and the more you spend you can buy it quite simply. This is where countering the competition becomes challenging especially when some of your competitors invest heavily in digital marketing. The capabilities of your competitors can be limited than your product but this can easily eat up a large chunk of your market share. So it’s highly imperative for founders to adopt a profound strategy to overcome this challenge when it comes to marketing their products/services in the digital space.
TheCconnects: How your product/solution can help to resolve the pain points of your customers?
Ramesh Kumar Lokanayakulu: Our product significantly decreases the time-to-market for any API integration, API testing, and Enterprise application development needs, for a few of our customers we have seen a 75% decrease in the time-to-market. With that, it also reduces manual efforts and maintenance costs quite drastically. We are here to challenge any traditional KPIs of any custom build or automated API integration & testing approaches.
Our delivery commitment is 1/4th of the effort or time or costs whatever it takes to build or maintain any API integration or API testing needs. In addition, the extended capabilities of the suite help our customers to accelerate any digital transformation initiatives by reducing manual intervention by 20% to 25% at the least.
TheCconnects: Do you have any advice for those who want to become a chief executive officer?
Ramesh Kumar Lokanayakulu: Entrepreneurship is all about risk taking and overcoming the fear that arises so often in the process to become successful. Risks could be calculative or sometimes not, it purely depends on the entrepreneur’s appetite, the idea they carry, the vision they have etc. but ‘Belief’ is the keyword. Certainly laws of attraction work for the brave and to be brave, at no point in time beliefs should be doubted.
It’s not always necessary to learn from their own mistakes, the world is changing and it’s about mind-set. The new-age entrepreneurs can learn from other’s mistakes, make a note of what could have been done better and plan their entrepreneurship journey accordingly, so that most of the risks become calculative to a certain extent.
You can connect with Ramesh Kumar Lokanayakulu on LinkedIn here
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