In a career spanning over two decades, Satish Murthy has held key positions across several prominent communications and IT companies such as NEC Technologies, Cisco, Mphasis (formerly BFL Software) and Avaya. In his current role as senior director and Bangalore site leader, Avaya India, he leads the company’s Bengaluru R&D team that works on networking and collaboration products. He and his team are responsible for transforming Avaya’s R&D centres into sites for business and engineering leadership.

According to Murthy, “The networking space is currently undergoing a transition similar to what cloud computing underwent with the advent of virtualisation a decade ago. Enterprises are now demanding solutions that lend agility to their businesses to cater to the growing smartphone generation. Legacy networks are up for replacement, and our customers tell us that Avaya’s SDN/Fx and fabric technology is precisely what works for them in such a scenario.”

The R&D team at Avaya is pushing the envelope by introducing advances in networking technology, and simplifying and transforming it at the same time. “Our vision for Avaya’s R&D centres involves keeping customers at the heart of every action and innovating constantly so as to keep things useful yet simple. A multi-year plan is in execution, which is focused on business maturity, engineering excellence and a world-class team.”

Murthy believes that agility concerns surrounding businesses must be addressed urgently. “We have been running many of the same networking protocols for over 25 years, even when business environments have gained greater agility, organisations have flattened and unified communications have become rich over the past years. The application space has become more dynamic, fuelled by the emerging mega trends of big data, mobile, social and cloud. However, the static architecture of conventional networks is ill-suited to dynamic computing requirements. The result is an increasing gap between the agility required for a successful business and that provided by the current networking foundation. Most IT professionals believe that SDN technologies are the way to bridge this gap.” An engineer by training, Murthy is passionate about developing products that can help improve people’s lives. He is currently excited about the internet of things gaining ground.