1. Ramesh Loganathan, MD, Progress Software

2. Suheim Sheikh, Founder, CEO, SDG Software Technologies

3. Sesha Rao, MD Indian Operations, Insideview

4. Sanjay Khendry, Vice President, Sierra Atlantic

5. Subramanian Ramanathan, Advisor, Cordys

6. Raghu Batta, Partner, Ojas Ventures

7. Santonu Paul, CEO, Talentsprint

8. Surajit Dutta, Independent Business Consultant

9. Kavita Vemuri, Senior Research Scientist, IIIT-H

10. Vasudeva Varma, Associate Professor, IIIT-H

Guest Judge-Panelists (for finale)
1. Ranjith Menon

Ramesh Loganathan, MD (Progress Software)
Ramesh Loganathan, the Vice President (Products) and Managing Director of Progress Software in India, is responsible for leading the product development at the India Development center. The center is organized in a COE (Centre of Expertise) model, where groups are organized inline with technology horizontals that work on multiple products/components. Present COEs include Eclipse based Development tools, Web tooling and Adapters. He provides strategic guidance to all PSI’s product teams, scale product operations with a specific focus on cross –product considerations for the SOA and Data integration products. Prior to Progress, he was the Vice President of Middleware Technologies at Pramati responsible for driving the product development, product direction and later setup the Technology Consulting business.

Ramesh is an accomplished Technologist and evangelist regularly speaking at workshops and seminars in India. He has been active in Tech fora, JCP and SPEC organizations. He has also been a Member of several Standards Expert groups including J2EE 1.3. Co-founded ebXMLIndia.org and hyd-eclipse.org, and organizes BarCamps and Startup events. In addition he is an adjunct faculty at IIIT, Hyderabad

Suheim Sheikh, Founder (SDG Software)
Suheim Sheikh , Founder CEO of SDG Software Technologies has built products  in the Capital Markets space for Trading Systems, Surveillance of Stock Exchanges and in the Banking space for Anti Money Laundering and Fraud Detection.SDG was acquired by 3I Infotech Limited and he now continues to serve on the Operating Board and drives global product development in the Capital Markets and Fraud space across many countries. He holds a B.Tech from IIT Madras, is a keen Yachtsmen and spends a considerable amount of time working in the development sector and  as a semi professional photographer.

Sesha Rao, MD, Indian Operations, (InsideView)
Sesha Rao is the Managing Director for InsideView’s India operations, based in Hyderabad. Sesha is responsible for growing InsideView’s development team—key to InsideView’s emergence as one of the fundamental applications on the enterprise business browser. Sesha brings more than 21 years of broad technology industry experience. Prior to Insideview, he was General Manager of India Operations of Progress Software, where he has been responsible for managing and growing the Progress’ largest software development operation outside North America, with more than 100 engineers. Prior to that Rao was VP of Indian Operations at Xiotech India Pvt Ltd. Sesha has significant background in building India-based operations and engineering teams from start-up to maturity, by implementing strong design process methodology and providing guidance and motivation to teams of engineers. He has held several executive positions at Matisse Networks, First Virtual Communications (Cedar Technologies), after relocating to India in 2000. Prior to 2000, Rao held senior level engineering positions at the silicon valley companies such as First Virtual, Adaptec, Mylex and Wipro where he was responsible for design, development and delivery of various hardware, software products in storage and networking domains. He worked on high performance products such as multi channel RAID controllers and networking technologies in ATM, FastEthernet and Gigabit areas.

While Sesha owes his entire Career growth to America, he relishes in his happy life in India. Sesha enjoys reading everything that catches his attention, including Indian philosophy. Sesha holds his B.Tech. Degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from JNTU and his Masters in Computer Engineering from IIT Kharagpur.

Sanjay Khendry, Vice President (Sierra Atlantic)
Sanjay Khendry is Vice President at Sierra Atlantic, an Outsourced Product Development and Enterprise Applications services company, head quartered in California with its development center at Hyderabad in India. He has over 21 years of experience in sales, business development, marketing, technology and general management roles in the software industry with a global exposure that includes US, UK, Japan, Asia-Pacific and parts of the Middle East. He has been with Sierra Atlantic since 1994.

Prior to Sierra Atlantic Sanjay handled sales and product management at Wings Infonet Limited; a financial accounting software package company. Earlier he was with National Information Technologies Limited - A joint venture of Press Trust of India and MP State Electronics Development Corporation in technology development and sales roles focusing on solutions for the newspaper industry.

An alumnus of Birla Institute Technology & Science, Pilani he has a Masters in Physics with a Bachelors in Electrical & Electronic Engineering. [Sanjay is an active Rotarian with a focus on children and education. An avid amateur photographer and a voracious reader he used to write a column on general management in The Deccan Chronicle.

Subramanian Ramanathan, Advisor (Cordys)
Mr Ramanathan has been responsible for Mr. Jan Baan’s investments in India since 1987. As founder employee and Director he established the Product Development Centre of Baan Company in 1987.. The success of this operation under Mr. Ramanathans’s leadership resulted in greater confidence in India’s capability and subsequently global support, consulting and marketing operations were established in Mumbai. In 1995 he played a key role in identifying and establishing Hyderabad as a growth centre for the Baan Company. Being one of the first major entrants in Hyderabad, he worked closely with the Andhra Pradesh Govt. and played a key role in promoting Hyderabad as an attractive destination for other software companies.

He has over 25 years experience in setting up global distributed product development centres, global product support operations, venture incubators, high end technology parks and, marketing and sales operations. As Adviser of Cordys India he is responsible for guiding and mentoring the management teams of R&D and S&D (Sales & Delivery to) take the company to the next growth phase. Mr. Ramanathan holds a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Bombay University and is certified in Integrated Resource Management (CIRM) by the American Production and Inventory Management Institute (APICS). He has also been certified in Production and Inventory Management (CPIM) by APICS.

Raghu Batta, Partner (Ojas Ventures)
Raghu joined Ojas Ventures in June 2008, after a five year stint at Vantage Point Venture Partners (San Bruno, CA), with an investment focus on wireline/wireless infrastructure-applications and digital media infrastructure. At VPVP, he was a key member of team that led investments in Spatial Wireless (sold for $275M to Alcatel), Widevine, (software based security platforms for IPTV and Open Internet), Entrisphere (sold to Ericsson for $290M), LiveScribe (revolutionary SmartPen computer), ProtoStar (Satellites over South Asia), Iand Innopath (over the air updates for cell phones).

He also sold two companies (Kagoor Networks to Juniper and Alopa Networks to C-Cor), as a board member representing VantagePoint. Prior to VantagePoint, he worked for over 11 years at various Data Comm and Telecoms companies in the San Francisco Bay Area in Prod Mgmt, Business Development and M&A at various companies that include Madge Networks, Bay Networks, Assured Access, Alcatel, and CopperCom. Raghu has an MBA from Baruch College, New York and B.E from Manipal Institute of Technology.

Santanu Paul, CEO (Talentsprint)
Santanu is working on a new venture related to talent management in emerging economies.

Santanu served at Virtusa Corporation (NASDAQ: VRTU) between 2003-2008 in a variety of senior management and operational roles such as General Manager, Hyderabad Advanced Technology Center; Asia Head, High Tech and BFSI Business Units; and SVP, Global Delivery Operations. He was a key member of the senior leadership committee that drove Virtusa's five-fold growth culminating in its public listing in 2007, and a 4000+ strong global organization. Prior to Virtusa, Santanu was Chief Technology Officer at Openpages, a Boston-based market leader in corporate risk management solutions. Santanu was also CTO and co-founder at Viveca, a B2B technology startup that Openpages acquired in 2001.

He began his career as a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where his team designed Rainmaker, a pioneering workflow system. For his work on workflow and content management, he has been awarded United States patents. Santanu has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he was a recipient of the prestigious Rackham pre-doctoral fellowship and the IBM Canada fellowship. He has an undergraduate degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Santanu has published many articles in international journals and has spoken at conferences such as Java One, Comdex, and AIIM. His interviews and articles have appeared in the Economic Times, Financial Express, Business Standard, Business India, and BBC online.

Surajit Duttachoudhury, (Independent Business Consultant)
Surajit has worked as a corporate level executive with over 27 years of experience. He has held Board level positions in local entity of three international (German, US & Nordic) companies. Beginning with a German joint venture, Computer-Kontor, for Siemens mainframe terminal emulation product development (6 years), Surajit managed the India operations for Intergraph, a US major in CAD related software (in Plant Design, Geographical Information System (GIS), Mechanical CAD, Image Processing etc), in India for over 8 years. Thereafter, Surajit helped grow a local start up company, Fortuna Technologies, in mobile handset software product development. Further Surajit helped the owners divest the business successfully and steered the activities for Fortuna Technologies to be acquired by a Nordic IT major, Tieto and assisted Tieto in integrating its business in India till recently. Surajit is an independent Business Consultant since February, 2009.

Prior to his foray in IT Industry, Surajit worked for automobile and turnkey mechanical construction industry - namely Tata Motors, Greaves Cotton and Larsen & Toubro - for 11 years since 1979. This adds to the overall exposure in his long career.

Surajit is experienced in multi country (Indian, German, North American, Finnish & Swedish) multi cultural organizations. He has managed operations for established as well as startup businesses, primarily in product development space.

Surajit is a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from Javadpur University, Kolkata and also trained (certificate) by Stockholm School of Economics in Business Management. Outside the work sphere, Surajit likes to spend time with his family and in sporting activities. He is keenly interested in golf.

Kavita Vemuri , Senior Research Scientist, (IIIT-H)
In the US worked in companies like Rational (now IBM), Converse Networks Systems, Galactic Industries (now ThermoGalactic) and at the Corporate Materials Research labs of 3M, Austin, Texas. In India was heading the Technology Development Center (TNTDPC) of CII at Chennai/Tamil Nadu and currently heading the Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at IIIT-H.

Fiber optic devices, control systems, telecom voice messaging applications and new product development have been areas of work/experience. Co-inventor of 2 US patents in ‘dispersion compensation’ in fiber optic communication networks.

Education: MSc/MPhil (HCU) – Physics, MS ECE from UMASS

Dr.Vasudeva Varma, Associate Professor, (IIIT-H)
Vasudeva Varma is a faculty member at International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad Since 2002. Prior to joining IIIT Hyderabad, he was the president of MediaCognition India Pvt. Ltd and Chief Architect at MediaCognition Inc. (Cupertino, CA). Earlier he was the director of Engineering and research at InfoDream Corporation, Santa Clara, CA. He also worked for Citicorp and Muze Inc. in New York as senior consultant.

He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Hyderabad in 1996. He has five patent applications and several publications in journals and conferences. In 2004, he obtained young scientist award and grant from Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, for his proposal on personalized search engines. In 2007, he was given Research Faculty Award by AOL Labs.

His research interests include search (information retrieval), information extraction, information access, knowledge management, cloud computing and software engineering. He is heading the Search and Information Extraction Lab and Software Engineering Research Lab at IIIT Hyderabad.

Guest Panelists (for finale judging)

Ranjith Menon,Investment Advisor, (IDG Ventures India)
Surajit has a background in general management & business development since 1990 in IT industry - spanning Tele-communication and CAD industry, beginning with a German joint venture, Computer-Kontor, for Siemens mainframe terminal emulation product development. Thereafter Surajit managed the operations for Intergraph, a US major in CAD related software, in India for over 8 years and helped Integraph develop leading edge products in Plant Design, Geographical Information System (GIS), Mechanical CAD, Image Processing through its offshore development center in Hyderabad. During this period Surajit also transformed the operation into a profit center. Since 2005, Surajit helped grow a local start up company, Fortuna Technologies, in value in mobile handset software product development. Further Surajit helped the owners exit the business successfully and steered the activities for Fortuna Technologies to be acquired by a Nordic IT major, Tieto, in September 2007. Surajit has been assisting Tieto in establishing and growing its business in India in mobile devices as well as network infrastructure related R & D services since then.

Prior to his foray in IT Industry, Surajit worked for automobile and turnkey mechanical construction industry - namely Tata Motors, Greaves Cotton and Larsen & Toubro - for 11 years since 1979. This adds to the overall exposure in his long career.

Surajit is a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from Javadpur University, Kolkata. Outside the worksphere, Surajit likes to spend time with his family and in sporting activies. He is keenly interested in golf.