TheCconnects: Can you tell our readers a little about your professional journey & how did you come to your current role/position?
Ravi Ramamurthy: I have wanted to be an entrepreneur since I was 11 years old. As a teenager, I remember creating new ideas, such as Guar Gum, and drafting project reports with my brother for new-fangled ideas. Many of these ideas were ahead of their time and needed an appropriate environment for market acceptance. But in our frenzy of creation, we would come up with umpteen new ideas, some extremely practical, but a few of them far-fetched for those times.
I subsequently joined IIT Chennai and earned a BTech degree. But my thirst for knowledge drove me to get ICWAI (Inter) degree parallelly. After graduation, I worked in an engineering and IT consulting organization for a few years. But my zeal for innovation propelled me to greener pastures. In 1987, I created the first SAAS-based product based on optimization algorithms.
Since our family hailed from modest backgrounds, I did not have the wherewithal or support to take this venture to the next level. A few years later, I sold our company to a multinational and got into unrelated areas. From a very young age, I was fascinated by mathematics and Physics. Arcane ideas have held my attention for a very long time. I became an editor of a leading science magazine in India, wrote a few books on Physics, and delved into the abstruse field of Quantum mechanics and IT.
A common underlying thread that impelled my journey was innovation and disruptive creation. For example, in the early 90s, I co-created a movement called (Electronic Performance Support Systems) now recognized as one of the fast-moving verticals by Gartner.
One thing led to another, and I co-founded an IT product company based on a new idea of process science. In the early days, when the world was grappling with the technological challenges of implementing ERPs and IT systems to automate processes across an organization, I knew it was just a matter of time before one would address all the technical issues. However, the more significant problem of human performance, human-machine interaction, would be the more substantial challenge confronting large organizations. As it turned out, these were precisely the problems enterprises have been grappling with in the last decade.
Today Epiance (Of which I am the CEO) is a technology leader in the Task Mining, Process Digitization, and Process improvement space. Our breakneck growth indicates that the idea has finally come of age.
TheCconnects: Who has influenced you the most in life and why?
Ravi Ramamurthy: There have been innumerable twists and turns in my life and to have made it so far largely unscathed in life seems a miracle. One of the biggest influencers in my life is Ms. Rashmi Aiyappa, Spiritual Scientist and Founder of the Aashwasan movement. I met her in 2005, and it feels like I was reborn that year. Until then, I was a seeker, inundated with questions and confused by many answers. While getting by in my professional life, I faced fundamental challenges in all aspects of existence- personal, professional, health etc.
Like most human beings, I had numbed myself to the vagaries of life. I was not feeling anything. Nothing touched me. At that time, I mistakenly believed that I had reached that stage of enlightenment that many crave. Little did I know that I was heading for a disaster. 2005-2006 was the most trying time of my life, and the guidance provided by Ms. Rashmi Aiyappa was instrumental in extricating me from the tarpit.
TheCconnects: What are the biggest challenges you have faced in your life & how did you overcome them?
Ravi Ramamurthy: I went bankrupt four times in my life, and each time rose like a phoenix from the ashes. I have encountered all kinds of adversities in life and luckily emerged stronger from these setbacks. One can learn from every misfortune. We may feel down, but we can always pick up the threads and rise. Behind every cloud, there is a silver lining. We can never give up on life. We must be perpetual students, learning from all situations- good or bad. This perspective has helped me immensely in navigating life with grace.
TheCconnects: What lessons have you learned from your professional career?
Ravi Ramamurthy: Our company was the first to create RPA. We co-founded the EPSS industry. Despite developing many disruptive technologies, I could not turn them into marketing successes. Many of these ideas were ahead of time. Some perished because of the lack of appropriate technologies. But I have persisted and witnessed the technologies impacting organizations and creating a framework for excellence.
My learnings are many- Being innovative at every turn is essential. We must look inward for answers and not get confused by trends and technologies outside us. While learning from our competition is beneficial, emulating them at every stage is harmful. Every individual and every organization has to set out on its unique path. What works for one will not work for somebody else. If one gets uprooted by every hype, ups and down in the environment, and keeps changing our direction, we will be like the wind meandering from one place to another without any true purpose or significance.
Staying strong, believing in oneself, trusting in the environment and people around you, and inculcating a spirit of compassion combined with excellence are the key ingredients to success. We are all lone warriors, and it is time that we learn to fight the battle in our unique ways.
TheCconnects: What do you see as the biggest challenge for brands in the digital space?
Ravi Ramamurthy: The biggest challenge for brands in the digital space continues to be – customer loyalty. Customers have many options and will exercise the options if the brand does not meet their requirements in a superlative manner. Therefore, delighting your customer has to be a core value of the organization. If your customer is not using your product or service how it was designed or is not deriving value from your offerings, it should touch your inner chord. This obsession with a customer to give the best that you have and make them successful will make your organization and brand stand out amongst the din.
TheCconnects: How your product/solution can help to resolve the pain points of your customers?
Ravi Ramamurthy: Automation and IT are the bulwarks of most organizations today. Enterprise applications automate over 80% of all operations. The end-to-end processing of these applications is the key to greater efficiency and productivity. An organization that can execute a process faster, with higher quality and lower handling time, will succeed in the market. Epiance products and solutions enable organizations to leverage their existing investment in IT and increase their return on investment.
TheCconnects: Do you have any advice for those who want to become chief Executive officers?
Ravi Ramamurthy: The job of a CEO is probably the toughest. It is challenging to stay relevant against the rising tide of competition and changing market conditions. To foresee these changes and prepare the organization for a challenging ride ahead is even harder. There are different CEOs, and I do not believe in advising others. I should be the change that I want to see. What works best for me is to be humble and never get carried away by my successes. Never be discouraged by your failures. Unpalatable it may be, we end up learning more from our failures. Believing in oneself, being compassionate, and trusting despite multiple l
About Ravi Ramamurthy:
1. Chief Advisor and Mentor, Aashwasan Group of Companies
2. CEO, Founder Epiance Software Pvt Ltd
3. Board Member and Advisor – Science Olympiad Foundation
4. Author- 11 Bestselling books in Physics
5. Patents: 4
R. Ravi’s life is an example of the fact that a person is born with infinite potential and he can experience it on a multi-dimensional level if he is truly in touch with himself.
An IIT graduate from Chennai and the youngest professor to be invited to IMT Ghaziabad, Ravi Ramamurthy’s achievements are varied. He is a member of the executive committee of the Science Olympiad Foundation, the largest Olympiad in the world. He is the CEO and Founder of a software product company called Epiance, which has clients all over the world who vouch for the product line that he created. At Aashwasan, he is the chief mentor and practitioner of Aashwasan Science, the unique science of human creation and experience. He guides the organization into creating pathways into the lives of people and taking Aashwasan to different parts of the world.
He has always felt driven to redefine education to make it a medium to reach one’s true potential. He has penned 11 volumes of interactive physics to enable students to enjoy learning as they understand the physical phenomena they live with. He has created programs such as Transformative leadership to bring out the true leader in everyone. He believes that no one should give less than themselves to their life. He has mentored innumerable individuals and corporate heads to enable their organizations to excel in their performance and happiness index. He has 25 years of experience in the corporate arena, where he has created various software products and innovated business processes. Some of the companies where he has mentored the executives, as well as senior heads, are SIEMENS, Stag Software, Sigma Aldrich, Reliance, NASSCOM, Zenthe, Ordyn technologies, and Xponential Dynamics, Net Partners, SPML, and many more.
He has 37 years of experience in the corporate arena. R. Ravi has been a pioneer of knowledge management and business process modeling. The innovative process capture technology that he conceptualized and developed was instrumental in creating the rapidly growing performance support industry that is the foundation of today’s business process mapping, knowledge management, real-time e-Learning, and performance improvement enterprises.
R. Ravi is responsible for a host of software, technology, and product innovations including the development of modeling and charting software and the creation of original multithreading concepts found in today’s relational databases. He has over 4 patents to his name.
Currently, he is associated with “Aashwasan” a unique spiritual Science organization that focuses on bringing out the best talents and potential of an individual. According to him, Aashwasan completes the experience part of many questions that he had always sought as a quantum physicist. Aashwasan, is a unique one of its kind spiritual science organization that adopts a uniquely experiential approach to address deep-rooted issues of individuals, organizations, and institutions all over the world.
Ravi’s success as an entrepreneur and a business leader lies in his ability to transform these innovations into pioneering and successful products that are globally sought after and used by the world’s best-performing companies.
His deep aspiration lies in giving humane touch to businesses, bringing the best potential of people which not only impacts their life but also impacts the lives of many in society. A person of deep humility and intense passion for simple virtues of life, he exudes inspiration and enthusiasm to excel.
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