Abhiram Kramadhati

As the Chief Technology Evangelist, I was part of the founding team that created the Developer Platform at Uniphore. With an aim to democratize Conversational AI, the role and the team worked on identifying the early use cases and building the MVP that successfully made the project mainstream within the company. Reporting to the CCO, I was responsible also for the design and execution of the organization strategy of the entire post-sales customer-facing part of the company.

My role specifically included creating the execution strategy for the organization and leading the product development of the Developer Canvas. In a lean team, we were hands-on with product development, organizational development and also responsible for the execution strategy for this industry-first product.

• Established and owned the Innovation Board, a small group of C-level executives from large customers and partners. The Innovation Board brought to life new-age use cases that Conversational AI can solve for. Through workshops, board meetings and ideation sessions the Innovation Board helped create the roadmap for the Developer Platform.
• Product Owner for the Developer Canvas, a central pillar of the Developer Platform which allows developers to create no-code Conversational AI solutions. I was the product manager for this product and we delivered the same over the course of 14 sprints. I personally owned backlog creation, backlog planning, customer validation and overall execution.
• Led the creation of the CPO strategy for the next 24months in the company's growth charter based on the success of the Developer Platform MVP. Strategy document was created on the back of numerous workshops covering competitive analysis, customer interviews from the Innovation Board, staffing plan and technology investments in the field of Conversational AI and Automation.
• Reporting to the CCO, created the charter for the CCO office in the post Series-E funding stage of the company. Strategy and execution on the following functions were owned by myself and my reports: Customer Success, Product Support, Professional Services, Cloud Incident Management and PMO. Working aggressively over a span of a quarter, the team structures, goals and staffing plans were created to set the company up for success in the view of aggressive growth goals. I also owned relationships with C-level execs of our most important customers and partners to ensure we build with our ears to the ground.

Responsible for starting and scaling the Partner Success practice for Webex Contact Center globally. Hired a team of 14 partner success managers across three timezones to work with Cisco's top-20 strategic partners as well the rest of the partner eco system to drive acquisition of new logos, migrate existing Cisco customers all while driving up renewals, reference customers and preventing churn.

• Created the Partner Enablement program to onboard and train 200+ partners to be successful with Webex CC globally.
• Manage complete partner ecosystem for Webex Contact Center including the top-20 partners with each partner doing $10M+ in annual subscription revenue.
• Work with Partners to create Reference Customers in all regions and make them available in the Public Reference Program across multiple verticals such as Finance, Healthcare and Travel.
• Support successful go-lives of critical contact center projects including ACT Government's COVID helpline in the middle of the pandemic.
• Design and manage the migration program for the on-premise Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) to Webex Contact Center:
• Cisco has a customer base of 45K+ brands using UCCX, all of which are partner-led
• Program focuses on helping partners migrate these customers to the cloud starting with moving from perpetual licenses to subscriptions.
• Migration tools to allow partners to deliver seamless migrations.
• Critical project to prevent customer churn to non-Cisco cloud platforms.
• Designed and delivered the NFR (Not for Resale) program that led 157 partners being able to deliver effective demos and PoCs, thus scaling the sales pipelines.
• Increased revenue for all regions by enabling partners to deploy Webex CC faster, and thus realise revenue on committed deals.
• Rollout of Mixpanel dashboards for all partners to enable effective customer engagements to drive multi-channel adoption.
• Digital Learning Experience rollout (golearn.webex.com) for Webex CC Partners.
• Partner Success practices to serve strategic partners including opportunity reviews that allowed product management teams to plan roadmap to meet future opportunities. Increased deal win percentage for partners against Cisco's competitors.
• Member of the Sales and Product Leadership team to execute on regional partner focused strategies.
• Partner Helpdesk setup to provide support for all partners during demo, prospect and pre-sales stage.
• Responsible for the EFT (Early Field Trial) programs to drive feature adoption with partners.
• Established internal team practices to allow for constant up-skilling of the teams during the rapid expansion of the Webex portfolio.

As the first employee in Australia for this function, I was responsible for establishing programs and tooling to ensure Google's response to mega outages and critical customer and partner escalations with specific focus on Google Cloud and Workspace customers.

• Responsible for designing and establishing programs to manage customers and partners during large scale Google outages including technology and data related outages, with visibility to Sundar Pichai and Thomas Kurien.
• Multiple new programs implemented to scale support to Google's enterprise customers.
• Executive escalations framework to effectively handle product and customer escalations to Sundar Pichai, Thomas Kurien and their leadership teams.
• Onboarding the team as it scaled from 3 to 23 people in less than 6 months.
• Automation of workflows: incident communication, checklists specific to scenarios.
• Establishing regional stakeholder relationships to execute event specific playbooks for supporting large events of global significance such as US Elections, Black Friday, Cyber Monday.
• Supporting customer account teams engaged in migrating on-premise systems to the cloud with specific focus on contact centre environments.
• Incident Programs covering multiple high impact areas such as data integrity, trust&safety, technology outages and user data security.

I was hired to lead the insourcing of all Network Operations from Telstra. I was responsible for the management of the entire network infrastructure of National Australia Bank. Started when the team was only 4-member strong and scaled to an enterprise level of 25+ engineers and 3 managers with expansion still in progress.

Apart from building the team, we completed insourcing to completely takeover network operations from Telstra which required setting up incident handling, design creation, catalog requests and all other processes to own Network operations end-to-end.

• End-to-End ownership of the Enterprise Network: design, deploy and support.
• Owner of creating and executing BCP plans for the Network.
• Managing the network infrastructure for 750 branches, 25 Head offices and the datacenters at NAB.
• Reporting to the General Manager, Networks and managing three teams: Datacenter, Wireless/LAN and L1 Network Support. Teams include support, implementation and design engineers.
• L1 team including command center setup with 24x7 monitoring.
• Define and execute the monitoring strategy for the infrastructure to align with the support vision for the bank. Complete setup of network monitoring infrastructure from ground-up including integration into ServiceNow.
• Create standard operational procedures for teams to handle outages, replacements and incidents.
• Manage vendor relationships: support, technology and commercial.
• ISDN to SIP migration of dealer technologies and also commercial banking's voice infrastructure upgrade
• Networking infrastructure build out to support overnight transformation of contact centre practices to work from home
• Executing COVID related BCP plan to allow the bank employees to work from home.
• Oversaw and led the strategic insourcing project for NAB providing a $5million saving per year to the bank.
• Build three large teams to take over operations from external vendor for complete network infrastructure of the bank
• Strategise and build the tooling to support the operations: Solarwinds, Infoblox, Ansible Tower, Elastic and Kibana, ServiceNow and Splunk integrations
• Setup of a L1 NOC team/Command Center to provide 24x7 support for network operations
• New vendor relationships for network support and deployment
• Processes to design and implement network uplifts and new features to allow for the digital transformation strategy of the bank (including cloud migration of legacy applications)
• Setup enterprise processes to meet regulatory needs and infrastructure requirements including all the ITSM processes:

Incident Management

Problem Management

Change Management

Vulnerability Management

Asset Management

Capacity Management

Business Continuity

• Define and deliver the roadmap for transforming network operations: automate deployments, predict network failure and auto-recovery
• Building and Up-skilling the team to support new technologies and vendors.

Key achievements:

• Building the Network Reliability Organization to enable the Insourcing vision of the bank.
• Build large, transformative tools like Solarwinds, Infoblox (and more) to allow for a smaller team to provide an improved service compared to the external vendor.
• Defining and executing processes with multiple vendors to enable support, delivery and meet the bank's requirements.
• Network transformation to enable increase of remote workforce from 20% to 80% in a 3-week period as a response to COVID-19: includes work to upgrade network capacity, VPN solution uplift and enabling applications to work remotely without compromise on customer security.
• Setup key ITIL and ITSM processes from ground-up: vulnerability, asset, capacity, change, incident and problem management. This includes integrations into enterprise tools to enhance, automate reporting and remediation.

Responsible for the operations and expansion of Cisco's Cloud Contact Center (Webex Contact Center) platform serving over 200 customers along with new infrastructure rollouts in new markets including ANZ, EU and Asia. In this role, I also oversaw the integration of the operations teams from Broadsoft once it was acquired by Cisco.

Key responsibilities of the role included:

• Customer Account management practice to support critical enterprise customers with focus on platform stability, feature adoption, upgrades and exec-level engagement to ensure continued renewals with Cisco.
• Escalation support for Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC)
• 24x7 coverage by Senior Support engineers supporting all Webex Contact Center customers
• Establish SLAs with engineering and product teams to support the large customer base
• Site Reliability Engineering for the Cloud Contact Center Platform
• Operations for the Cisco Cloud Contact Center Platform for enterprise grade customers
• Infrastructure rollouts for new markets - network, platform, applications and voice
• Incident Response and Management
• Field Communication and Customer Management
• Setup and management of operational metrics for the organization

As the team leader, my individual roles, responsibilities and some highlights included:

Define and develop the account management practice for the Contact Center Business Unit

• Team of TAMs and PAMs (working exclusively with large partners) to successfully deliver Cisco's solutions.
• Create the program of account management including engagement model, measuring success and defining the account allocation processes.
• Collaboration with Sales, Marketing and the Support team to roll out the program in North America, EMEA and APAC.
• Model to align Technical Support Account managers with large partners to enable scale.

Escalation for Cisco TAC

• 24x7 support for Cisco TAC, acting as the highest level of escalation for TAC engineers.
• Build and maintain the technical abilities within the team to ensure the sanctity of the escalation team is maintained.
• Learnings from field and product quality translated into improvement areas for engineering teams.
• Introduced a bot-based support channel with re-use of existing knowledge base to automate queries: escalation volumes brought down by 30% Y-o-Y, there by increasing engineer productivity and bandwidth back to the team to work on innovative projects.
• Be the voice of the customer to drive product innovation and engineering backlog.

Site Reliability Engineering

• Team objective: "Design, execute and own activities that ensure the Service Level Objectives of every critical service is met while enabling effective internal operations including deployments and maintenance activity."
• Monitoring: Build and optimize performance monitors to track and monitor performance of the platform services.
• Automation: Identify and build automated test suites to effectively monitor the cloud platform availability, with workflows to trigger incidents upon failure.
• Automate alert responses and create runbooks for those that need manual intervention.
• Change Management: Manage the deployment and maintenance activity schedules including customer notifications.
• Identify areas that still require manual deployments and automate the same to eliminate error and speed up deployments.
• Capacity Planning: use the current performance metrics of the platform to continuously plan for capacity to accomodate the on-boarding pipeline and new provisioning activity.
• Log management strategies to ensure availability of the right details for the support teams.
• Engage Product Engineering and Product Management to effectively identify and address areas of product improvement.

New Application and Network Infrastructure Deployments

• Plan and manage deployments of new Data Centers including voice, application and network infrastructure in different geographies.
• Execute large deployment projects to align with business goals of geographical availability of Cisco's solutions.
• Planning activity includes AWS platform design, network connectivity, voice infrastructure and application availability.
• Planning for region specific compliance requirements such as GDPR.

Incident Response and Management

• Complete setup of the Incident Management Process for the Cisco Customer Journey Platform (Cisco's Cloud Contact Center Platform).
• Creation of a custom incident communication and management tool for Incident Managers that helps with effective communication with our customers and partners, internal status page for executives and stakeholders to track incidents.
• Incident Postmortems: Setting up the the Postmortem culture, publication of incident reports to customers/partners and driving incident learnings towards resolution through the organization's different teams. Driving the organization towards a 99.999% availability goal.
• 24x7 Incident Management support: Incident Management rosters based on PagerDuty with global coverage for incident managers.
• Statuspage.io setup and integration into the operational tools

Platform Operations

• Monitoring the platform for performance, availability and acting on alerts generated.
• Checklists and run-books for un-ambiguous handling of alerts , maintenance activities and outages to ensure minimum downtime.
• Metrics tracking performance and alerts, and translating trends into actionable intelligence for engineering teams.

Operational Metrics

• Setup the infrastructure and framework for detailed operational metrics that track product, customer and engineer performance. These metrics are now used by the entire organization for all decision making.
• Reporting infrastructure setup based on Elastic and Kibana. Kibana dashboards have now been shared with all stakeholders within the organization ranging from product quality and customer issues reported from the field.
• Team based dashboards: I am a firm believer of making data available to every engineer so that decision making is easier and consistent across the organization.

Responsible for building up the team responsible for handling support escalations for the entire APAC region for Cisco Contact Center Solutions (UCCX, UCCE). A challenging role, it required me to remotely manage and mentor the team both in terms of technical expertise as well as escalation handling practices. We built the framework to engage with the different field teams within Cisco, setup the tool for handing and tracking cases and most importantly setup the framework to report on the performance of the teams. This framework has since been adapted across all Collaboration technology processes and the framework has been pivotal in ensuring that the learnings from the field engagements filter back into engineering teams thereby improving product quality.

• Handled large Cisco customers acting as their single point of contact for ensuring success with their deployments.
• Assisting with pre-sales design reviews and providing escalation leadership for post-deployment issues, the role required close engagement with the executives at these large customers.
• This continues to be one of the most important customer facing roles within Cisco. This role involved handling critical customer cases for large enterprises and ensuring regular executive updates while aligning all resources to resolve the problems in a timely manner.
• 20+ Field enablement programs delivered including 10 CiscoLive sessions.
• Designed and delivered content to 200+ partners
• Program designed around Contact Center Design and Deployment to enable the Cisco Partner community to sell and deploy more Contact Centre products from Cisco.

In addition to the largely customer facing activities, I am passionate of processes and frameworks that enable diverse and distributed teams to execute towards a common goal. I created, amongst many process innovations, a chat-bot based escalation framework which has improved the team’s productivity by close to 50% in the last year alone. Such process innovations and creating frameworks for escalation practices that has been adopted by 1000+ engineers across different business units have been highlights of my focus on this area.

Being part of the Product Leadership team, I worked with a core group of people who are responsible for all decisions related to the product right from product roadmap to the product support strategy. The learnings and the interactions I had on a daily basis with customers helped in providing the field perspective in the decision making.

• Build and mentor a team for global support of the Unified Contact Center Express product including setting up support mechanisms and reporting infrastructure around it.
• Leading the current creation of a new worldwide initiative called 'UCCX Uplift', which is a 3-day technical conference aimed to build technical competence among our partners who in turn ensure Cisco's success.
• Played leading role in delivering a 5-day technical seminar in China and continued support, aligning with Cisco's new geographical areas of business focus.
• Responsible for critical accounts and customers with high-visibility in the region.
• Constantly involved in ensuring new features are included in product development while trying to refine the processes already in place.
• Creation of Support Escalation framework and process innovations now adapted across technology verticals and business units.

Worked as an engineer and later as the technical lead in the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) team for Cisco Contact Center solutions. As part of my role, I handled a number of technical escalations with high business impact. Some of the most important skills I have acquired from this experience are to think on my feet and handle people's sentiments when dealing with a problem.

• Ensure ownership of high-impacting customer issues and drive them to a resolution.
• Mentoring and developing two new teams to while ensuring smooth business transition.
• Best-presenter in Cisco Technical Partner Summits in Bangalore, Bangkok, Singapore and Sydney.
• Part of the Subject Matter Expert team for Cisco TAC Bangalore center, which is about 2% of all engineers at the center.

Leading cross business unit interactions, though not part of the job role, which led to higher customer satisfaction.