Balan Subramanian

I lead the Product organization for Azure App Platform. Across a global team of 40+ product managers, we manage cloud services that drive over half a billion $ annually and are used by over 70% of Azure customers. This includes: * Azure Cache for Redis w/ Redis Labs, Azure API Management, Azure Integration Services (Enterprise Connectors, Orchestration, APIs, Messaging), Azure Spring Cloud w/VMware, Azure SignalR, Azure Web PubSub * AppDev services: Azure App Configuration, App Insights Profiler, Azure Change Analysis, Azure Managed Grafana * The Marketplace++ program for Azure-native SaaS such as Elastic, Datadog, Confluent, F5 Together, these services enable the platform for cloud workloads from cloud-native apps to event-driven intelligent solutions to integrations for mission critical business solutions, for thousands of customers across several industry segments. I also drive strategy and execution on workloads such as Java and Application Integration end-to-end across product, field enablement and partner integrations. Before focusing on services and frameworks, I built the Azure Developer Experience organization with 50+ product and program managers responsible for the end-to-end experience for Azure workloads, covering all touchpoints for teams working on cloud apps. In addition to the above Platform services, this included: * Azure Container Registry, Microsoft Container Registry, Azure Lab Services * DevEx for all Azure services through polyglot SDKs, VS Tooling, and docs * CLIs and OSS tool integrations (Terraform, Jenkins, Ansible) * IoT, Java and Go end-to-end on Azure including framework (e.g. Spring) and toolchain enablement (e.g. VS Code, Maven integrations) * Cloud-native services such as Azure Dev Spaces and container tooling A key part of what I do is focused on creating a product culture that is data informed, customer obsessed, and couples business insights with technical innovation and a desire for delighting customers.

Led product and drove sustainable impact on two keys areas of the Heroku Business - Developer Experience (DX) and Enterprise Experience (EX). Mission one was to reestablish Heroku as the developers' platform of choice, by enhancing Heroku's core developer experience. We launched Heroku Flow, as a complement to the GitHub flow; I directed key platform capabilities such as app.json, the Platform API for releases and the Heroku Button, collaborating closely with partners such as GitHub and Twilio. This evolved into Heroku Review Apps, an industry-first capability at the time, and other key platform features such as the Heroku Elements marketplace. My next challenge: Making Heroku the app platform of choice for Enterprise application teams, an untapped segment for Heroku. With a goal of bringing the same productivity and delightful experiences that Heroku had delivered to thousands of startup and individual developers, to enterprise developers, dev teams and administrators, I envisioned the Heroku Enterprise product. I drove buy-in across the company and bootstrapped the new brand and offering, targeting team collaboration, ease of governance and new pricing models that balanced predictability with PAYG. I enabled the Heroku field with selling the vision and the product, partnering in true startup mode by building systems that enabled acquiring and signing new enterprise customers as we worked with the larger Salesforce field in putting the sales machinery in place. This resulted in new, healthy, sustainable revenue stream for Heroku and within the year, Heroku Enterprise was delivering $60M+ in revenue driving Heroku towards its first $100M+ year. I also integrated Heroku Enterprise into the Salesforce App Cloud offering which we co-launched with Salesforce, and kicked off Heroku Teams to make the collaboration feature set available outside of the Enterprise product.

Directed a cross-functional team in designing, building and delivering a new API driven data platform for self-service, intuitive visualization and predictive analytics. Stood up and managed multiple services through iterative releases with an emphasis on evolving the user experience and programmatic enablement towards democratization of data. Also built the concept and roadmap for a new general purpose data management platform with ingestion, orchestration & multi-tenant processing capabilities.

Productized, launched & managed the Amazon Simple Workflow business. This offering centered around aws.amazon.com/swf, a cloud-scale service that enables elasticity, efficiency & reliability in cloud apps. Customers use SWF to build apps out of stateless microservices, by abstracting state away and using a programmatic approach to orchestrating app flow. This includes NASA engineers building image processing pipelines for the Curiosity rover and devs at Sage Bionetworks building a genome processing platform on AWS. SWF has since evolved into AWS Step Functions for Lambda which adds visual and JSON workflow definitions. Azure launched a similar offering, Durable Functions, in 2018, which enables programmatic orchestration. I built the business case, pricing, revenue model, launch collateral & ran the beta program with NASA and other customers. Made a key pivot to a platform service for web and mobile apps rather than business workflows. I managed business performance (metrics, measurement & strategy), growth hacking, partnerships, and product roadmap. Within months, grew usage past capacity with 1000s of users over the free tier. * Created new AWS category: "Application Services" * Built an innovative, usage driven pricing strategy and model along app dimensions; defined prices by analyzing API flows, backend costs & realized value * Created launch case studies and collateral for the first ever AWS re:Invent Keynote * Designed & built the management console experience & walk-through * Drove metrics and instrumentation to efficiently get real-time insights into usage patterns * Helped startups & enterprises such as Fluid, Bandwidth, SendMe Mobile, Nokia, Adobe, Marketshare, Carsguide, Change.org leverage the offering for selective scaling, parallel processing & cross-cloud execution * Customer validated and delivered key features such as fine grained permissions On the AWS report: http://youtu.be/y7Mff1ceypo Thoughts on SWF: http://wp.me/p2fLDS-j

IBM Master Inventors typically have several issued patents and a track record of innovation of value. Most importantly they sustain the pace of innovation at IBM by mentoring inventors across product groups and technology areas. They impact the strength of the patent portfolio by evaluating disclosures for technical and business value to IBM. IBM Master Inventors are nominated and named by peers. Named an IBM Master Inventor in 2008 in recognition of "strong, sustained involvement in the patent process at IBM" and issued patents including one designated High Value to IBM. In this role, - Chaired an IBM-wide disclosure review board which resulted in the addition of several valuable disclosures in business rules and analytics to IBM's IP portfolio. - Was a voting member on several other Invention Disclosure review teams in the areas of systems management, virtualization technologies and autonomic computing. - Mentored across business units on the patent process - Helped refine ideas into disclosures and patent filings - Advised attorneys in disclosure evaluation and patent prosecution. Most satisfying accomplishment: mentoring new hires through several patent disclosures and helping them establish an attitude of continuous innovation.

Strategy and competitive positioning for cloud computing across IBM business units. Built a differentiated cloud strategy and guided the evolution of multiple products to support cloud use cases. Results = improved market positioning and immediate impact on sales in multiple market segments & geos. In 2010, was featured in the IBM SWG Wall of Accomplishments in recognition of these results. Was also awarded a second Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for Leadership in cloud competitive product strategies. With a strong grasp on cloud use cases, emerging customer requirements, and technology & delivery models, formulated holistic strategies for co-opetition with various competitors and partners. Determined positioning in several segments, built competitive, sales, and marketing strategies and coordinated them across brands and business units. Specifically: * Guided the development and positioning of IBM SmartCloud Provisioning, Hybrid Cloud Integrator, IBM Cloud Service Provider platform and other products. * Successfully surfaced and integrated research technology for high scale, low touch cloud provisioning into multiple products and offerings * Created both technical roadmaps (hybrid cloud management, provisioning and monitoring at scale, workload management) and pricing strategies * Engaged with new customers particularly service providers and international enterprises * Guided account teams on competitive product positioning * Drove requirements across the product portfolio to address gaps * Guided GM and executive management on strategic investments and partnerships * Advised technical leadership team on evolving the portfolio to meet virtualization and cloud computing market needs.

Cross-portfolio product manager for data integration and discovery technologies. Working with customers and internal stakeholders from various product teams, managed requirements and built technology for data integration, discovery and federation in traditional, virtualized & cloud environments. Specifically, drove the roadmap and execution of Naming reconciliation, Asset linking, Discovery services and Common Data Model technologies in different IBM products By understanding customers’ issues, competitive threats and capabilities across Tivoli portfolio, delivered an integration strategy and corresponding components that continues to enhance revenue across the portfolio. The components were delivered within several products spanning the Tivoli portfolio of provisioning and monitoring products. Built business plans for continued investment and also guided strategy for adjacent products such as Tivoli Director Integrator. Also drove the design of the REST APIs for integrating Tivoli products with the IBM Director family of products.

Led the development of the data center optimization feature set in IBM Tivoli portfolio (now found in the IBM Tivoli Monitoring product line): https://www-304.ibm.com/software/brandcatalog/ismlibrary/details?catalog.label=1TW10TM6X# Built financial and statistical models of data center with predictive recommendations for optimization. Designed mechanisms to collect various metrics through the stack from hardware to application workloads, aggregating them, correlating usage metrics with energy metrics, applying several prediction algorithms and providing consolidated analysis-based recommendations. Closely collaborated with IBM Research labs across the world to productize research work. This involved integrating implementations of specific statistical algorithms with existing product functionality to introduce a new feature set that could be easily leveraged from existing and green field installations. Chief programmer for the IBM Tivoli Services Management feature pack offering spanning multiple products Designed and built, * Proactive resource discovery for IBM Tivoli TADDM leveraging WS-Notifications and web services based metadata discovery * Associative Policy management in IBM CCMDB * Flexible automation in IBM Maximo Led component leads across geographies

Technical strategy, design and code contributions to Eclipse projects around Web Services for Distributed Management. Led the team that built the Managed Resource Explorer for WSDM and JMX instrumented resources and WSDM tooling for building WSDM interfaces for managed resources

Led the development of runtime and tooling for WSDM with contributions to the Apache and Eclipse open source projects Built a cross continental engineering team Elected Committer to the Eclipse TPTP and Apache Muse projects Enabled WSDM adoption by IBM Websphere Application Server (WAS) particularly the WSDM Feature in WAS 6.1 Feature Pack for Web Services (http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21264563) Collaborated with IBM Tivoli for the design, implementation and delivery of the IBM WSDM Generic Collector Engine for use with IBM Tivoli Monitoring (https://www-304.ibm.com/software/brandcatalog/ismlibrary/details?catalog.label=1TW10TM3V). This enables ITM to query WSDM resources and also receive notifications.

Received an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for contributions to Autonomic Computing technology in my first year as a full-time engineer at IBM Built the IBM Generic Log Adapter Toolkit in collaboration with IBM Hawthorne Research Labs. I also optimized the Autonomic Correlation Engine from IBM Zurich Research Labs and enabled its production use. Collaborated with Cisco and IBM Systems Group to individually build and deliver the IBM BladeCenter Autonomic Computing Package highlighted by IBM CEO as part of the IBM Cisco Alliance announcement (http://www.crn.com/news/networking/18841943/cisco-ibm-extend-partnership-to-data-center-solutions.htm;jsessionid=NPbhZfJooKjloFzLIgnMZQ**.ecappj03) Created several prototype solutions involving IBM WebSphere, IBM DB2 and Cisco networking technology as proof of concepts for autonomic computing architectural patterns. Enablement lead for Problem Determination and Log / Trace technologies Led the cross-IBM workgroup on serviceability touchpoints.

Designed and built the backend for P2P workflow and collaboration solution called TaskShare. The solution incorporated RPA, human-interactive workflows and audio/video collaboration through a Peer-to-Peer, decentralized architecture of client devices.

First job out of college. Architected and shipped JavaEE applications for customers.