The major part of Ram’s career has been with just two Companies: twelve with Philips India, and seventeen with Voltas Ltd., a Tata Group Company. The depth, width, and quality of experience gained through working with India’s most respected enterprise, the Tata Group, and with a Global Healthcare and Lifestyle major, both across a wide range of assignments, has provided rich learning.

After a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a Post-graduate degree in Business Management, both from India’s premier schools, Ram started his career 31 years ago with the Tata Administrative Service (TAS), the Tata Group’s central talent pool. His 17 years with Tata were in technology intensive businesses in the power electrical industry, and spanned manufacturing, marketing, sales, execution and customer support. He was given profit-centre business responsibility very early, 5 years into his career, and all assignments thereafter were as a profit-centre head. Ram had the opportunity to work with both European and North American technology partners. Customers were large private and public sector corporations and utility companies.

Ram accepted Philips India’s invitation in 1993 to head its Human Resource function. His contribution was in transforming the function to a ‘business partner’, and pioneering what were then innovative people policies and practices. In 1998 he was appointed the first Indian CEO and Country Manager. Steering the Company through a restructuring phase, building a cross-business management team, building credibility with key stakeholders, consolidating several legal entities, raising Philips shareholding, strengthening employee engagement, steering the Company into the profitable growth phase it is currently in, and laying the foundation for building sustainable new business models relevant for emerging markets, are some of the challenges he successfully met in this assignment. Ram was appointed Cluster Manager for the Indian Subcontinent (India, Pakistan, SAARC) in August 2006.

People, Transformation, Change, Revitalisation, and Innovation best capture Ram’s learning and contributions and these have become his professional interests. He enjoys meeting and working with people from diverse cross-sections and walks of life, and often share experiences and learnings at forums of other companies, professional bodies and academic institutions. Ram was the President of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI), a premier Chamber of Commerce, during 2002-2003.

He is married to Anita and they have 2 children, Ayesha (27) and Kartik (25), both at University in the United States. Ram’s is a close-knit family, and all four share a passion for reading (mostly non-fiction), music (eclectic), travelling and vacationing (any place not been to before), new experiences (people, exploring places, food, books, movies), and cooking. Their 12-year-old cocker spaniel Fudge is an integral part of the family.

Murali has nearly 27 years of overall experience in Information Technology. His tenure over these years has earned him skills in global delivery, financial planning & budgeting, Global Operations, Business Development and IT infrastructure Management. He has worked in companies that have been ISO certified, CMM & PCMM Level 5 compliant & BS7799 certified.

Murali started his software career with Rambal Pvt. Ltd (now part of Shiram Group of Companies, Chennai) and rose to become the Assistant Manager of their IT operation. He was then selected to travel to IBM Corporation, NY, USA as a programmer trainee in 1984. He spent the next 20 years with IBM, CMC, and Covansys Corporation, USA. He was a Systems Engineer and then an IT specialist with CMC, during which time he took care of some of their prestigious Utility & Financial projects. During his association with Covansys, he was instrumental in growing the Utility & the Financial vertical of the company and he received the best Business Leadership award. When Covansys became a 100 million dollar and a publicly traded (NASDAQ: CVNS) company in 1997, he relocated to Covansys, India as a 'General Manager' to head & grow a Delivery Unit for them. His rise within Covansys was meteoric as he became Vice President, Sr. Vice President and then the Executive Vice President and remained with them till end of 2003. Before deciding to join Intergraph Consulting in 2005, Murali was with Birlasoft Limited at Noida for about a year, as Senior Vice President, where he was heading their largest LOB (Line of Business) and controlling nearly 75% of the revenue.

Murali received his Bachelors degree with honors from Delhi University and pursued his Masters Degree in Electronics from the same University. He has received lot of certificates and appreciation & awards for Programming, Design, Project Management & Business development skills and he is also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from Project Management Institute (PMI-USA).

Murali enjoys listening to music, reading books on our Vedic philosophy & applying them to our modern day management and traveling with his family.

Georg Kniese MD, SAP Labs

Georg Kniese has held management positions at SAP Labs India since January 2005, first as joint managing director (MD) with Martin Prinz and as sole MD since August 2006. Georg joined SAP in 2002 as the coordinator for SAP’s global SAP Labs, responsible for organizing the global development locations and defining the key planks of the company’s global SAP Labs strategy. In October 2003, he also became head of operations for the Application Platform and Architecture business area.
Before joining SAP, Georg was a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group in Zurich, Switzerland. He began his career at the European headquarters of Procter & Gamble in Geneva, Switzerland, where he held several roles in the finance department. Georg holds a master's degree in business planning and management (majors in finance, IT, and operations research) from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.

Ramesh Emani President (PES), Wipro

Ramesh Emani is President - Product Engineering Solutions Division of Wipro Technologies. Ramesh is also member of Corporate Executive Council of Wipro Ltd. In a career at Wipro of over 20 years, Ramesh has the unique distinction of moving across the technology and enterprise spaces of the organisation. Ramesh did his Masters degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 1980. This was preceded by a Bachelors degree from the College of Engineering, Kakinada, in Electronics and Communication Engineering.

G.K. Sukumar or ‘Suku’ as he is known currently leads the Industrial Sector in IBM’s Global Delivery business in India. He leads the Automotive, Manufacturing/Aerospace & Defense, Electronics, Chemical & Petroleum sectors.

Suku has worked in several roles across IBM’s Services business in India and has successfully built several practice and competencies including SAP in India. He also holds the responsibility of being the location head for IBM in Hyderabad.

Suku has been with IBM since 1997. Suku has over 23 years of experience in the IT Services business and has an unique insight of being part of the change that transformed IBM India from a small 600+ entity to being the second largest IBM country after US.