So long IBM, and thanks for all the fish


20 years ago, I walked into an IBM office in Philadelphia to interview for a role is the SAP analytics team. The interview was not hard at all and when I was asked whether I had any questions, I asked “Why should I join IBM instead of one of your competitors?”.

The interviewer said “If you want to build toys and do the same thing over and over, you have many options including our competitors. If you want to help land a man on the moon – you should join IBM”.

That was it – I was sold right then and there and I joined IBM. I can’t say I managed to do anything that can be compared to putting a man on the moon – but I did some pretty amazing work here for my clients.

IBM is not the kind of place you run away from – the primary reason being the IBMers who make this place special. Some of my best friendships are with the people I have met here – colleagues, clients, partners etc. My value system is closely aligned with the high standards IBM is well known for. So it did take a great opportunity to run towards – and a lot of tossing and turning and introspection- before I decided to move on. I will talk more about that next week. My last day in IBM will be December 7th,2025

I hardly ever did the same thing twice in my time here – I just looked at LinkedIn and realised that I had 12 different roles and 12 different managers in the last decade or so – including some that I did in parallel. Crazy as it sounds now – I can say that it was the ride of a life time and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

I worked in all our commercial markets in various roles across consulting and technology, did a global stint, was CTO, ran multiple large businesses and learned so many different technologies along the way. I was mentored by some of the very best leaders in IBM, and I in turn was lucky to play a small part in the careers of several IBMers (and some outside IBM too). One of the most satisfying parts of my time here was sponsoring and teaching Bee school and T-school when they first started. Several of my “students” are now senior executives 🙂 . Those sessions are what gives me hope that one day I might be able to live my dream of teaching math and physics to high school kids!

My daughter has only ever known me as an IBMer. Look at what she wrote in her first grade journal about the job she wants to do 🙂

In the first part of my time in IBM, it was Ken Englund and the late John Leffler who took me under their wings and taught me everything I know. No words will ever be enough to thank them.

In the second half, there have been multiple leaders that I have learned from. I will refrain from listing them because I am sure I will forget someone. If I could pick the best manager I ever had in my life – in IBM or outside – that would be Marianne Cooper. She was my boss only for a year or so but she was several notches above everyone else that I have to give her a special shout out.

I have fond memories of solving very hard problems for our clients and the high highs and low lows that inevitably had to be experienced. A few I remember vividly – writing a costing application for the entire supply chain of a F100 semiconductor company from scratch, solving a complicated planning problem for a mutual fund where the chief investment officer had the fancy idea of “infinitely flexible model”, helping an FS client create their first machine learning platform …. and so many more. The reason I remember them are because of the engineering geekiness, but the real challenge was never the technology. All those projects tested my ability to bring together the right people and keep them focused through the ups and downs.

IBMers are a very special kind of people and I will terribly miss working with you all every day. If I have offended any of you along the way, please accept my sincere apologies. I will always be grateful for our time together!

I will always be an IBMer in spirit – and I am sure I will meet you all at some airport somewhere on the globe 🙂

And Pranab – I never thought you and will both join and leave IBM together. Wish you nothing but the very best dada !

Ollie Vijayasankar – 4/29/2013 to 8/24/2025


Ollie joined the family as an eight week old pup. Rebecca Heiman found her for me from a litter than Brianna Bischoff had bred in Houston. We had called in love with him from the first photo we got of him. He was the “Orange Boy” of that litter.

His two big brothers – Boss and Hobo – welcomed him happily.

We used to have a big orange tree in our backyard and all three of them loved to pluck oranges from the tree and play with them. I never had to buy tennis balls for that gang

Rebecca handled him in the show ring

He was a good looking dude from day 1 and his good looks let him get away with a lot 🙂

He is the only dog I ever had that didn’t get any obedience training at all – to his last breath he didn’t even know how to sit on command. He lived for hugs and I was happy to comply.

He needed two surgeries – one for eating half a bath towel as a 7 month old and then another for eating a bunch of stones as a ten year old!

Much like Hobo and Boss – he too loved swimming in the pool.

Boss and Hobo absolutely helped raise Ollie. And Ollie helped raise Archie when he joined our family.

They had been inseparable – and much like how Boss and Hobo were patient with Ollie when he was a young pup, Ollie was quite a considerate older brother for Archie

About a year ago Ollie was diagnosed with cancer. Unfortunately cancer is quite common in golden retrievers. I had lost Boss to cancer as well when he was about 13. His doctors and I discussed extensively about options. I had tried surgery with Boss which eventually proved to be a bad idea. Ollie was not a good risk for surgery and we didn’t do it. He took some medication and seemed to be ok for a while

Unfortunately his condition worsened in the last few days and I had to make the painful decision to help him cross the rainbow bridge.

He had all his favorite things to eat – scrambled eggs, his favorite canned dog food, ice cream ..

We hugged a lot – making Archie quite jealous. He played for a little while with Archie

Today morning we drove to the vet’s office – Ollie as usual calling shot gun.

He was a champion all the way – walked in and greeted everyone and got petted by all the staff. He comfortably settled down , took a sip of water and went to sleep peacefully in my arms

Run free and fetch oranges from the pool in heaven, Ollie balls. Till we meet again !

The future of business applications


As always – these are strictly my personal opinions

Let me start by reiterating that I still don’t agree with Satya Nadella about Apps just being nothing but database CRUD

So where do I see apps going next as AI gets better and better ?

Let’s take an HR platforms as a starting point. They cover a wide array of workflows that deal with finding talent to onboarding and training them to managing performance to paying people and ensuring compliance and separating people from the enterprise. Probably many many more such processes are in scope of such systems.

Now fast forward a few years when Agentic AI moves from science project to active deployments. Now you literally have the same job done by both AI agents and human workers . An example would be say handling invoicing where AI agents do the simple ones and humans do the corner cases. It won’t be one agent – it will be hundreds or thousands of agents who are doing all or part of the enterprise workflows.

That means you now need a system of record to recruit the best bot , onboard those bots, train and retrain them and so on. A science project doesn’t need any of it – but a scaled deployment absolutely will delve into massive chaos unless it is governed.

HR systems of the past have massive technical debt already. If they try to tweak their metadata and data and UX to accommodate digital labor, it will take quite some time and money. This opens up a massive chance for startups with no tech debt to create simpler platforms built for such co-existence. Knowing my exceptionally talented friends at the big enterprise software companies – I am sure they will find clever solutions to all of it, but the threat of disruption is quite real for established app companies in my opinion.

HR was just an example – literally every workflow in an enterprise like marketing and supply chain and so on will get redesigned to make use of digital labor (and other conventional AI goodness too – but probably those are incremental and not as disruptive).

AI will help write and test a lot of software – but not all apps can make use of them equally. I am not sure if apps that need a lot of rigour and consistency like accounting will let go of human control and let AI take over coding and testing.

That’s just the software development side of the story.

Think about the FinOps side of the story next. Today – where most of enterprise workflows are deterministic – it’s quite hard for most companies to plan for and optimize their spend on apps sitting on cloud. There is a whole genre of very funny jokes about hyperscaler bills on the internet. Now think about what happens when AI with its probabilistic and compute hungry nature becomes mainstream. That whole discipline will need to be redesigned !

Let’s also think about the SI ecosystem that is vital to deploy software. When SAP and Oracle and so on got challenged by new app companies – something that was touted loudly was that these newer platforms won’t need significant SI work. On quite a literal sense – that might be true. But if you look around – all those companies ended up building very high SI ecosystems around them.

So where does SI ecosystem move to when apps get disrupted?

I think BPO will be the first casualty – where most of the repetitive work can be automated away. There are SI companies out there who have hundreds of thousands of BPO employees in a labor based model. They all have smart engineers too – but since public markets don’t take kindly to drops in revenue, they have limitations in massively automating. That leads to two possibilities – newer and nimbler “tech first” SIs will go after the incumbents and win OR a hyperscaler or software vendor will wrap the labor into an outcomes based contract with clients and just dis intermediate BPO types services. Either way – BPO the way we know it today is going to be toast. Other things like production support (AMS) also will go this route.

But the more interesting question is whether software deployment can minimize its dependence on SI firms at all. So let’s delve into that a little

AI is already good enough – or close enough to be there soon – to not need a lot of human labor for creating reports and forms and so on. GenAI is quite effective with data manipulation and soon we won’t need as much human labor for data conversions either.

That means the big question is whether developing interfaces and enhancements can get easier with AI. Enterprise software is a lot better today than 25 years ago – but interoperability is still not a key strength. Metadata, APIs etc are all different across platforms – and given most big platforms grew by acquisitions, often they are not very well standardised within a platform either. That’s what has historically needed a lot of skilled SI labor to implement software. GenAI does give options to change this equation drastically.

Even if development work itself still needs a lot of skilled labor – think about things like discovering logic of old code, testing and so on which today take a lot of time and effort. If you look at a transformation project end to end – those are the things that eat up time and money the both. They can absolutely make use of AI to help make massive productivity gains

Just like with software apps – it remains to be seen if SI companies will disrupt themselves or get disrupted by new entrants.

There is some net goodness in all of these things if we are adaptable. Those AI models still need to be trained to take over repetitive tasks – the BPO folks doing repetitive work today might be quite valuable in training AI to do such tasks, and then move on to higher order work like orchestrating workflows as market changes. It’s not a zero sum game unless we make it one by sitting around waiting.

For all of us in tech world – the choice is between getting excited and learning and adapting fast OR getting paralyzed with fear, not learning and just reduce our economic value as market rapidly changes around us.