Balan Subramanian

linkedin.com/in/balans

Ardent product manager with demonstrated success in delighting users through business and technology innovation Passionate about building game-changing offerings driven by unique positioning, pricing and marketing strategies Competent in analytically building differentiated strategies and data driven tactical execution Excited about building intuitive user experiences, creating frameworks & platforms and helping customers innovate Created sustainable value at entrepreneurial & established organizations such as Amazon and IBM Successful at creating at scale, services and products, reinvigorating portfolios and building targeted offerings Broad experience with customers including mobile & web startup developers, enterprise architects, CTO/CIOs, ISVs Motivated by responsibility for market performance and complete product lifecycle from conception to profitability Background & Demonstrated competencies MBA, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, 2009 (Strategy, Product Design, New ventures) MS Computer Science, George Mason University, 2002 (Thesis: Performance evaluation of web services) BS Computer Engineering, Anna University, Chennai, India, 1999 (Thesis: A Frame based web pre-fetching mechanism) Business: Strategy - Competitive, Pricing, Marketing, Uncertain environments; Venture development, Negotiations, P&L Technical: Design patterns, Enterprise and Cloud Architecture, Java, Basic Scala, Web 2.0 frameworks, WS-* Leadership: Product Management, Strategy, Building and managing cross-functional teams, Agile development, Innovation, Customer Enablement, Open source commitership Awards, Publications and Patents IBM Outstanding Achievement Awards in 2010 for Cloud Product Strategy and in 2003 for Autonomic Computing Launch leader & sole PM for Amazon SWF planned, designed, launched, augmented and grew usage past capacity 17 issued and 31 filed patents across consumer, web and enterprise technologies Featured on the AWS Report; collateral featured in various key notes by AWS, IBM executives and customers Consistent top performer: Exceeds rating my first year at Amazon and top 5% consistently at IBM in various roles Community appointed committer on open source projects; competent in driving strategy through partnerships IBM Bravo Award for leadership in delivering open source runtime and Eclipse tooling for WSDM in 2006 15 IBM Bravo Awards for authoring/publishing; IBM Fellow Awards in 2003 and 2004 IBM Master Inventor (2008 -2011), Sixth Plateau Invention Achievement Award, High Value Patent Award Chair of Business Rules/Analytics Invention Disclosure Team Selected Accomplishments Product Management Director, Product Owner at Salesforce.com Building a new API driven metrics platform for monitoring, management and visibility into the salesforce.com platform Direct a cross-functional team in designing and delivering a new API driven metrics platform with self-service capabilities, intuitive visualization and predictive analytics. Create and evangelize the vision for the new platform and drive continuous, agile delivery towards the vision Identify new target customers & synthesize requirements for increased platform visibility along the core value of trust Manage the roadmap and backlog, identify minimally viable product for each release and continuously engage customers on new features; Drive emphasis on intuitive user experiences and programmatic enablement Identify and prototype new techniques for data ingestion and visualization; guide technical strategy Senior Product Manager and Product Management Lead for Amazon SWF at Amazon Web Services (2011,2012) Launched & managed market performance of a unique cloud service with a focus on broad developer & enterprise adoption Productized, planned & launched Amazon SWF - a platform service that enables developers to build elasticity, efficiency & reliability into their applications and also build loosely coupled service mashups. I drove all inbound, outbound and strategic activities and was continuously engaged with customers, partners, engineering team, account managers, solution architects and executive leadership. Within months, grew usage past capacity with 500+ users over the free tier including XL customers such as Nokia, Carsguide, SendMe Mobile, Fluid, Sony and PBS towards a $3M+ run rate.

 For launch, created and managed the positioning, pricing, capacity model, collateral & ran the beta program Reworked product direction (positioning, roadmap) and created new AWS product category: Application Services Designed business metrics for the service and was responsible for managing performance against those metrics; created a framework to efficiently get real-time insights into usage characteristics Market-vetted and synthesized requirements for key features such as fine grained permissions & activity marketplace Designed & built the management console experience & hands-on service walk-through Built an innovative, usage driven pricing strategy with pricing dimensions along app dimensions Methodically derived the actual pricing model by analyzing API flows, backend costs & delivered value Managed/created FAQs, press releases, samples, technical collateral, webinars, revenue model, capacity forecasts Improved UX by creating frameworks for notifications, proactive usage monitoring, and failure recovery Enabled startups, enterprises and web properties such as SendMe Mobile, Nokia, Fluid, Change.org, Adobe, E-Raum, Carsguide, Bandwidth.com in using SWF for selective scaling, parallel processing and cross-cloud execution. Also helped customers identify new features for their products enabled by their use of SWF Automated dynamic capacity management with a framework for analytically identifying most valuable customers Managed the beta program with customers like NASA JPL, Sage Bionetworks, RightScale and MarketShare resulting in a tuned offering and launch references. Created 2 well received case studies for launch this collateral was featured in various customer talks and in the AWS re:Invent conference keynote and widely quoted in social media Ran several, targeted surveys to methodically gain insights into different user segments; Implemented targeted marketing strategies to address need, ability and willingness to use the service Kick started partner ecosystem by building capabilities for ISVs and SI partners to add differentiated value Enabled vertically focused solution architects, business development managers, and account executives Cloud Computing Strategy and Product Management at IBM (2009) Leveraged business insights and analytical skills as lead strategist in cross-product Cloud PM team Awarded Outstanding Achievement Award, a selective IBM award, for Leadership in cloud competitive product strategies Drove strategy & competitive positioning for cloud computing across business units at IBM. I enabled IBM and Tivoli to build a differentiated cloud strategy and guided the evolution of multiple products to support new use cases. This resulted in improved market positioning, immediate impact on sales in multiple market segments and the creation of 3 new market-driven product offerings. I determined relative positioning in several segments, built competitive, sales, pricing and marketing strategies and coordinated them across brands and business units. In 2010, I was awarded the highest performance rating and featured in the SWG Wall of Fame in recognition of the results I delivered. Directed individual product managers on cloud requirements and market trends leading to enhanced cloud portfolio Guided positioning of SmartCloud Provisioning, Hybrid Cloud Integrator, Cloud Service Provider platform Identified & enabled development on primary value prop of easy, visual configuration for Hybrid Cloud Integrator Created differentiating strategies & roadmaps for hybrid cloud management, data integration, provisioning and monitoring at scale. Guided execution of strategies by technical, business leadership (CTO, GM) Created usage based pricing strategies including per Workload models and guided pricing changes across portfolio Identified key customer needs leading to better positioning and messaging of IBM offerings vis--vis the competition Provided competitive positioning of WebSphere PaaS offering along with Tivoli and systems group IaaS offerings Steered strategic focus to include cloud service providers and determined segment requirements leading to new offering definition and successful announcement. This solution includes IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, a key technology from IBM Research for which I built performance and functional benchmarks. Collaborated with partners on application catalogue solutions that provide a seamless UX for our users & their users Enabled field sales and marketing with competitive product positioning and messaging resulting in significant wins Product Manager for Portfolio-wide Data Integration and discovery technologies at IBM (2008) Responsible for product management, development & adoption of data integration/discovery technologies. I synthesized customer requirements around data integration, discovery and federation and context sensitive launches. By analyzing customers issues, competitive threats and capabilities across the Tivoli portfolio, I delivered integration technology that was well received and enhanced revenue across a $60M portfolio through strategic integration. Also,

 Built economic value based pricing strategies that enhanced revenue through added integration value Created game theory based strategies for predicting standards adoption and payouts; Guided investments and market strategy; Formulated business plans for continuing and new investments Drove data integration strategy with business partners, Global User Groups, SWAT and product beta customers Provided product management support for the Directory Integrator product leading to a market tuned release including simplified user experience for cross-data center integration Delivered Lightweight Discovery Tool and strategy for Tivoli wide Common Discovery Technology Product Lead for the Tivoli Data Center Optimization for Energy Management product at IBM (2007) Led the innovative application of statistical and financial modeling to data center optimization Enhanced competitive advantage through design & delivery of key modeling component to spearhead Tivoli strategy By understanding customers data center needs and optimization pain points, built the use case scenarios Led cross-geo team including IBM Research colleagues on the delivery of the modeling and prediction component Designed and built holistic views and reports to highlight optimization potential and augment recommendations Engineering lead for Plug N Manage and Autonomic Process Flow through features at IBM (2007) Led component teams in US and India towards delivery of Plug-n-Manage and Autonomic Process Flow through scenarios Chief programmer for the Autonomic Computing Feature Pack with feature additions to various Tivoli products Positioned offering for flexible, collaborative management in cloud & virtual environments. Designed and delivered proactive resource discovery, policy association and flexible automation components Built a worldwide development team and provided direction to a virtual, cross-functional team Technical lead for Web Services Distributed Management and Open Source Strategy Liaison at IBM (2006) Furthered IBM open standards strategy through delivery of industry reference implementations & tooling in open source Delivered industry first runtime and tooling for WSDM, an industry standard spearheaded by IBM, in open source Built tooling in Eclipse targeted at both developers and analysts leveraging qualitative user feedback Guided and collaborated with industry partners such as Cisco, CA, Compuware in Eclipse and Apache projects Awarded community-nominated committer privileges to Eclipse (for tooling) & Apache (for runtime) Engineering and enablement lead for Autonomic Computing technologies at IBM (2005) As the autonomic computing technical evangelist, I enabled the proliferation of autonomic computing Led enablement engagements and cross IBM workgroup for common serviceability interface definition Voice of the customer for new feature development; Drove requirements for common AC components Design and development of Autonomic Lotus Workplace components at IBM (2004) Delivered Autonomic collaboration functions for the Lotus Workplace as part of the Extreme Blue program Prototyped and published invention disclosures on collaborative spam classification and e-mail ranking Engineering of Generic Log Adapter & Architecture for self-healing systems at IBM (2002, 2003) Saved 1000s of development $ in the adoption of standard tools; Awarded Outstanding Technical Achievement Award Delivered the Generic Log Adapter and incorporated it into the AC toolkit and Log and Trace Analyzer (later in Eclipse) Productized machine learning and correlation technology from Hawthorne and Zurich Research labs IBM Abstract User Interface Markup Language toolkit Component development at IBM Lotus (2002) Received an outstanding rating for delivering core widget library and an innovative object pool library Lead developer of TaskShare: Collaborative workflow & document management at Ecocys Technologies (2001) Drove the design & development of innovative peer-to-peer product for a funded startup Architected the P2P workflow and collaboration framework (mobile + desktop) using Jini and JavaSpaces Created patent pending technology for multi-user video conferencing, collaborative viewing/editing of MS Office documents, shared collaborative browsing and peer-to-peer calendaring system Differentiated product through competitive analysis of Groove networks & engaging with key customers like KPMG

Other projects Competitive Strategy for open standards adoption at IBM and UNC Kenan-Flagler business School Game theory based strategy for staged implementation and support for open standards Mobrand venture plan at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Business plan for mobile cloud platform to support back ends for mobile applications Managed Content Distribution - Infrastructure for distributed content delivery and aggregation at IBM Created industry solution targeted towards telcos (Bharti, AT&T) or B2B and B2C content distribution and ingestion Strategy and uncertainty / Strategic technology analysis at IBM and UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School Created engage-to-eliminate strategy to use portfolio integration for competitive advantage. Also identified revenue potential in data center optimization at IBM, and social networking based advertising model and mechanism. IBM Web Services Toolkit Demo development and test automation at IBM Emerging Technologies Researched web services performance as part of Masters thesis work Six sigma projects at GE Global eXchange Services Individually delivered multiple sigma projects for improving software development and delivery processes Online Resume Monitoring System for IBM HR at IBM Global Services Developed automated resume system for IBM India HR using Microsoft technologies and migrated to J2EE