In today’s business scenario, research has shown many times that having women at the top positions in the hierarchy is ‘good business sense’: firms perform better with diversity. Experienced leaders get the best from their workforce which enables to tackle various issues including gender-inequalities, ensuring companies do not miss out on the full range of leadership potential at a time when optimum performances can lead to a boost in economic growth.
Development opportunities while truly embracing the diversity are provided by some global organisations. Among them, Brocade networking solutions help the world’s leading organisations transition smoothly to the world where applications and information reside anywhere.
Prudent Leaders – Critical Ingredient for Organizational Success
Swapna Bapat, Director of Systems Engineering at Brocade, is based out of Bangalore. Swapna is responsible for leading the company’s technical developments for the data center and software-defined networking, as well as developing best practices and excellence in systems engineering in India. She is pioneering Brocade’s SDN solutions to solve customer problems and grow their business.
From enterprise data centers to the service provider core, Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) develops extraordinary networking solutions that connect the world’s information. Delivered directly and through global partners, Brocade end-to-end networking solutions help today’s data-intensive organizations optimize information connectivity and maximize the business value of their data.
It is believed that open networking solutions and architectures are the future of networking, and are critical to the success of SDN. One way Brocade is demonstrating that belief is through their work with OpenDaylight, and their selection of OpenDaylight as the basis for the Brocade SDN Controller. They offer scalable, SDN-enabled and SDN-ready networking platforms, including the Brocade MLX Series router, Brocade VDX switch, and Brocade ICX switch families. The Brocade SDN Controller is the first commercial controller built directly from OpenDaylight code, without any proprietary extensions or platform dependencies. Brocade’s open approach to NFV differentiates Brocade from other vendors by ensuring value delivery in multi-vendor environments.
Brocade’s NFV solutions are open and modular, so they can be easily integrated into your application suite and ecosystem to create a holistic solution. The Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager, for example, is the industry’s only complete, software-based Layer 7 application delivery controller (ADC) with an integrated web content optimization (WCO) capability, which frees applications from the constraints of traditional hardware-based load balancers. New IP is the ideal environment for deploying revolutionary business models that take full advantage of the mobility, cloud, social networking, and big data technologies collectively. Brocade recently launched the Gen 6 Fibre Channel which enables organizations to address the performance, reliability and scalability requirements of hyperscale virtualization, new data center architectures, and next-generation storage technologies.
Encouraging Swapna…
Swapna’s mother has been her greatest inspiration. Her grit and determination to be the best at anything she does, and has driven Swapna to have the same attitude. She has always encouraged and supported her in career decisions.
“It is very important that as a woman and caregiver, we inspire our daughters to understand that women can be very successful in the technology industry. Ensuring my daughter sees me as an inspiration keeps me motivated,” says Swapna.
“Family is first. You find time to complete your work by utilizing every moment to the maximum,” she adds further.
According to her, top skills needed to be successful in business: Focus on your customers, understand your customer problems, and believe in your team. She has built a team of smart and accomplished individuals, so as they do their job, she can do hers. Brocade proves to be an exciting place to work, since they have the best people in the industry who have come together to transform the way networks run today – make networks react quickly to business demands.
“Understand your customer’s business and goals is key to achieving a long-term relationship with them. Taking their feedback, and updating them about trends in the industry is another way to ensure they are in sync with technological advances. Finally being their most trusted technical advisor is what every member in my team strives to achieve”.
A Team of Tech Virtuosos
Professionals at Brocade ensure that the customer comes first and work as a team to their customers solve problems and grow their business. Each member in the team acts as a trusted advisor to the IT team within the customer environment. Swapna’s core team’s strong technical skillset, tremendous energy, and commitment to the customer, allows her to drive the technical strategy for Brocade in India.
Brocade is focusing a lot on next generation architecture, technologies, and solutions. They are investing heavily in the software side of the network and they believe that software is going to define the network. However, a very robust hardware is required to support software. Hence, the physical hardware needs to be very efficient to support these high-performance next generation overlays. So Brocade is looking at being the specialists in data center solutions, helping customers’ transition to the New IP and guiding them on adopting the latest technologies at reduced cost and ensuring increased revenues. Whether it is storage area networking, or Ethernet fabric, Brocade continues to invest in automation, and they continue to invest in maximum utilization of resources.
