A  man of varied interests, C.R. Narayanan is an engineer by qualification, an MBA in finance and likes to keep himself abreast of the latest technological advances.

“After I became an engineer, I aspired to pursue a career in the field of technology. Over time, I decided I wanted to get into management and finance, so I pursued an MBA in finance. My ambition continuously changes depending on the environment and needs.”

Along the way, he learnt some valuable lessons, which he has put to good use, especially in the boardroom. In his current capacity as CIO at Tulip Telecom, he is mainly responsible for ensuring that the company’s data centre is of international standards besides providing services to data centre customers, mainly revolving around back-up and disaster recovery, and developing products and solutions such as videoconferencing and cloud-based applications.

His work experience spanning three decades is a big help. He has worked in various organisations including DSC Limited, where he was senior vice-president; Spanco Systems and Solutions as group CIO; and at Alstom India, where he was director, IT. His responsibilities have included implementation and administration of business applications, IT strategies and IT infrastructure involving hardware, software, communication devices and connectivity.

He considers his stint at Alstom India as his most memorable one. During his tenure there, he “brought in the concept of IT as a profit centre, which was operating as a cost centre. Being a cost centre was not giving the IT function the visibility it should have got. This was quite demotivating. To counter this, we made a catalogue of the IT services we provided, with proper service level agreements, which helped to measure performance effectively.”

He is quite eager and confident of tackling any challenges that come his way in his current role as well. With regard to the targets before him, he comments, “Tulip is in a steep growth phase, which necessitates the processes and systems to be in place. This is what my teams are currently working on. There is a need to integrate some systems that operate in silos in order to give a single view of the organisation. I head the data centre services, which is going to be the next thrust area for the CIO community. This is an area where a lot of innovation and creativity have to be exercised. Developing cloud services securely is also on the anvil.”

When not busy streamlining Tulip’s communications infrastructure, Narayanan unwinds through reading, playing golf and listening to music.