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Jayaraman ‘Jay’ Iyer: Exemplifying Leadership and Teamwork

In the digital world, data is generated at a tremendous rate and storage management becomes an important aspect of business strategy. In such a case, Software Defined Storage (SDS) simplifies the task by offering a flexible and efficient storage system by reducing dependencies on the physical hardware. OSNEXUS Corporation assists companies in managing their storage ranging from small sites to hyper-scale deployments across global data centers with QuantaStor, the leading Software Defined Storage (SDS) platform.
A Frontrunner’s Expertise
Jay Iyer is the Vice President of Engineering at OSNEXUS. He has worked with leading enterprise storage companies including Veritas Software, EMC/Isilon, and Brocade. Therefore, he brings in more than twenty years of enterprise storage software development experience to the company.
As the VP of Engineering at OSNEXUS, one of Jay’s responsibilities is customer troubleshooting and he has an excellent approach towards the target audience. He gets an inside look at how the customer is using the platform and issues they come across relating to software or hardware. He then takes issues to his engineering team so that they can fix the bugs or come out with new features designed specifically for customer needs. This produces a well-rounded platform that is designed for market-specific use cases.
Humble Beginnings
Jay has been primarily involved in software development for storage management at enterprise data centers. In the late nineties, he was involved in software development of maintaining and enhancing storage, network, system management drivers on OS/2, and Windows for HP Platform. He has worked on building a generic framework for managing heterogeneous storage systems at EMC, Compaq, Netapp, Hitachi, Sun, and HP all under one roof. This datacenter storage software management suite ‘San Point Control’ was fairly popular within the data center community and helped solve a critical problem that arose in configuring, managing, monitoring, and reporting for storage administrators.
Sharpening the Tools of Success
Coming from a non-metro city in India, the biggest hurdle for Jay even before graduating was to find a willing employer to give him an opportunity to intern for his final semester. Bangalore was the ‘must-go’ destination for a large portion of prospective fresh graduates in Software Engineering from all over India. This created a very skewed supply and demand scenario. Getting the initial break was a major hurdle, recalls Jay. Once onto his first job, there were different kinds of challenges to overcome in the initial years with access to information and documentation. “There was no substitute for hard work or perseverance,” states Jay.
Jay has closely worked with a Fibre-channel switching software development team, to bring in high-availability infrastructure software for intelligent data migration solutions, integration with multiple external key management solutions for Brocade encryption switches, and a software stack to configure ethernet fabric. He and his team were primarily involved in bringing their first embedded key management solution on the OneFS platform to enable integrated encryption capabilities.
Over the years, Jay has been working at different layers and integrating with multiple third-party software stacks. He has learned the critical role played by control plane software in any IT infrastructure. “If this layer is developed right, it goes a long way in scaling up the infrastructure and optimally utilizes the capabilities that a heterogeneous system has to offer,” Jay expresses.
Defining Roles
Jay points out the vital attributes which every tech individual should possess in the business world driven by technology. Strong technical skills in the primary domain of expertise and basic working knowledge of related areas; Critical, out-of-the-box, thinking & willingness to learn and adapt as the technology landscape continues to constantly evolve are a few essential requirements of an ideal tech individual. “He must be ethical in character, eager & enthusiastic to learn and share knowledge,” Jay adds.
Communication skills are indispensable to clearly articulate ideas which play a vital role when it comes to interaction within the team or with customers. An ideal leader should also possess good problem-solving skills. Jay’s advice for the emerging technology enthusiasts is, “Be tuned in with the developments in the industry. Learning is a continuous process that never stops. Every new problem is an opportunity to learn, innovate and solve.”
Emphasizing on Technology
According to Jay, the primary task of the technologists still remains the same over the years, which is to leverage technology to solve problems. With the advent of the internet, social media and computerization of various aspects of business, the source and consumers of data have increased in manifold forms. Technologists today have to embrace the scale and scope of ceaseless development when they design a system.
Technologists today are required to have a better understanding of the core business and be able to better define the scope of the problem and the proposed solutions. These factors play a key role in helping businesses remain agile and competitive.
Jay’s focus continues to be in building a great team that contributes towards the innovation in Software Defined Storage Platform at the company. “This helps us to give our customers a high-quality compelling SDS alternative to proprietary storage solutions,” says Jay.
Source :-The 30 Most Influential Business Leaders in Tech 2018