Incredibly adept in team development, Dr. Nataraj Narayan has been a part of the Information Technology field for the past 25 years. He recently joined NewsX for an insightful conversation as part of NewsX India A-List and spoke about taking on the role of Managing Director at Nirmata, a company involved in Kubernetes deployment, management and much more. Read excerpts:
Speaking about his decision to join Nirmata, Dr Nataraj said, “I looked at the four parameters- team, technology, market, customers. These are the four pillars, and Nirmata has built a best-in-class solution to address these challenges. I specifically look for founders who are obsessed with delighted customers and solving tough problems. Building successful startups requires tenacity, grit, and focus, I feel that the Nirmata team is out-innovating everyone in this market by focusing on the long game.”
Telling us about his plans for Nirmata, Dr. Narayan said, “First and foremost, is to build a strong engineering team in India. Second priority is to boost the sales strategy. Partnerships and channel-led sales strategy have always worked for us.”
“If you change with time, time will never leave your side,” is Dr. Narayan’s advice to professionals and companies. Elaborating the advice, he said that the professionals or companies that can crack the employee, customer, and stakeholder experiences, will exist in the market.
When asked about the attributes that he thinks make a good worker, he said, “It is the dedication and keenness to innovate and excel. The knowledge and expertise follow this automatically. Run for excellence, rest will follow.” He added, “Progression will initially be measured by one’s knowledge and learnings. Based upon the skills and learnings, role and opportunities will automatically come but one has to really see the readiness to take some risk, and aggression. Only this can give you a steep progression, because the more risk you take, the more you tend to benefit. We also have to be cognisant that we can be ambitious but not greedy.”
Sharing his vision for Nirmata, Dr Narayan said, “Our vision is to be a billion-dollar evaluation unicorn in 3-5 years.” Elucidating his strategy to achieve the goal, he continued, “During the past 12 months, I have seen the accelerated adoption of Kubernetes in the production environment. In order to benefit every Kubernetes customer, Nirmata has decided to open-source our policy engine Kyverno. It has been seen that there are 6 million downloads in a month. So that means, the organisations, which tend to use the open-source, they tend to use Kyverno. So, that’s a wide adoption. All we are talking about, is how to monetise this particular momentum and then take Nirmata to, in 3-5 years, the Unicorn stage.”
In his concluding remarks, Dr. Narayan put forth his thoughts on the prospects of India becoming a trillion-dollar economy, “I particularly feel that we will basically be around 5 trillion in the next 4 years. We have the potential of being a 10-15 trillion dollar economy in the next two decades, if we play it right. Indian companies are pretty ambitious and Indian market is also opening up.” He also praised PM Modi’s digitisation initiative and said that the country is moving faster than anybody could have thought.