A telecom industry veteran, Ramamurthy Kolluri has over 30 years of experience in the field of avionics and telecom. During the course of his career, he has been involved in crucial assignments such as setting up telecom infrastructure and implementing transformation strategies for converged network, among others. One of his major responsibilities in his initial years was managing the profit and loss account for the broadband division of Siemens.

Subsequently, he joined Bharti Airtel, where he held multiple positions. His first assignment with the company as chief technology officer was to launch national and international long distance operations. “This was a greenfield implementation and there were several challenges in network roll-out, in keeping pace with the explosive growth in transmission, data and voice networks,” he says. Thereafter, as vice-president, strategy, engineering and architecture, from 2008 to early 2013, he helped Airtel expand its offerings in the OSS domain. He executed several important projects, such as establishing a global network operations centre for managing wireline and wireless services and rolling out a customer experience management system for mobile broadband.

After spending more than a decade at Airtel, he recently founded Telacrity Networks to offer consulting, project management, operations support and managed services to enterprises, and telecom and utility companies. Kolluri is also currently a senior consultant with Cyient (the erstwhile Infotech Enterprises) for its telecom business. He assisted the company in enhancing its OSS offerings and acquiring other OSS service providers.

One of the major challenges for Kolluri is ensuring effective network management and enhancing customer experience in an era of heterogeneous networks. He is of the view that more companies will adopt analytics to address this issue. Another trend that he foresees is companies establishing network experience centres to monitor and manage customer experience.

Kolluri has a B.Tech from the Jawaharlal Nehru Technical University in Hyderabad and an M.Tech from the IIT, Kharagpur. He enjoys reading and spending time with his family. “My wife ably supports our family. While my son works as an IT architect in the cloud computing domain at IBM, my daughter is a marketing professional,” he says. An ideal vacation destination for him is a green and relaxing place, like Stressa Lake in Italy or the hilly areas of north India.