Tanuj Vohra, Senior Vice President, R&D Centers, CA Technologies, India speaks about innovation at the India Technology Center.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW
DC: How is the India Technology Center contributing to the CA Technologies microcosm?
CA ITC is actually a microcosm of all of CA. With about 2,000 engineers we are the largest presence of CA in any particular campus. As I think about what we do on a day to day basis about 30 percent of worldwide product engineering is done out of this lab. Which means we are working on cutting-edge innovation, we are working on specific technology areas which as both existing customer needs as well as next-gen technologies all being done end-to-end out of here.
When I talk about product engineering, it’s not just about creating an engineering function as in developers. Think product management, think globalisation, localisation, testing, end-to-end ownership of those components is being done out of ITC, right here.
DC: How does CA Technologies encourage innovation internally?
There are couple of ways we are fostering innovation within the organisation. We have a program called Garage and that allows us to go and experiment with next-gen technologies be it blockchain, data sciences, IoT and so on. To be able to go and figure out how we can incorporate them back into our technologies.
We do a lot of designathons to just harness the new ideas that out and to be able to take them and then figure out how to take them to market.
In terms of innovation we are fostering design first thinking — everything from getting the lean campus to making sure that we have done enough experiments in terms of using researchers and designers to come up with the best possible solution; creating hackathons on campus to be able to leverage the excitement, the energy, and the ideas that are there within the organisation. And to be able to harness all of that and to take that to market.
If I think about our engagement with ecosystems we have a very robust and mature accelerator program at CA. It’s in its third year and we’ve already had a few organizations graduate from it. Any employee within CA can take an idea and they can pitch it to the office of the CTO. We select about a dozen of these ideas every year and we run them just like any other incubation project outside. It gets some funding and they get a dedicated route to be able to work on that technology. Go pitch it again for the next round of funding to be able to mature the idea working with a lot of the technical gurus within the organization and at the end of it, we are really excited that some of these actually mature and graduate out of the accelerator program. Very proud to say that the first program that graduated out of the accelerator was our very own, out of our Bangalore office; it was a program called Jarvis which was really around advanced data analytics.
DC: How is CA Technologies helping customers cope with disruption?
In this age of digital disruption and transformation, our customers are constantly struggling to keep up with — whether it is innovation and technology or the disruption happening in the marketplace.
At CA we firmly believe that the products and the solutions that we have and the tooling that comes along with it — that allows us to help our customers transcend the barriers that they have and to be able to accomplish their outcomes successfully.
I am hoping that we will be able to partner with our customers in this geography as well as worldwide to be able to eliminate their barriers and take ideas to outcomes.