Episode 13: Rohit Kumar Salesforce Career Conversation with ROD. Listen to Rohit talk about his career journey, to become one of only a handfull of Salesforce CTAs currently in India.
[Below is a transcript for your benefit. Please excuse any typos.]
Lee Durrant: Hiya. It's Lee Durrant here. Welcome to another RODcast. I'm joined with Theresa again today. Today we're interviewing Rohit Kumar, who is a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect based out in India. He's one of only five CTAs in India which is quite interesting, I think. We get to chat with him about his career. Hope you can bear with us.
Lee: Welcome to Rohit Kumar. Thanks very much for joining us. How are you?
Rohit Kumar: I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. How about you?
Lee: Yes, we're good. Teresa is with me.
Theresa Durrant: Hello.
Rohit: Hi.
Theresa: Good to meet you.
Rohit: Same here.
Theresa: Excellent.
Rohit: Hope you're safe.
Theresa: We're very safe.
Lee: We should say again for people listening in that this is May 2021, so still very much in the middle of COVID, and I totally appreciate, Rohit, where you are it's awful at the moment. For people listening, that's where we are. We're very safe here, but how about you over there, mate? How's it going?
Rohit: I think it's going good. The situation is definitely not good and government is trying its level best to see what best they can do for everyone. We are in total curfew as we speak. I'm very hopeful that the situation would improve in the next couple of weeks. Fingers crossed. Let's see how the upcoming weeks would be.
Lee: Whereabouts are you, Rohit? Whereabouts are you in India?
Rohit: I am in a city called Bangalore. It's in the south of India and is primarily referred to as one of the IT capitals of the world. Most large organisations, product-based companies or any companies into advisory, consulting, are primarily headquartered or will have a bigger branch in Bangalore, India.
Lee: Fantastic. Before we go into the questions about your career and how you got to where you are at the moment, I was reading today that India has got the largest worldwide concentration of Salesforce technical talent, which I didn't know. It made sense, but it's one interesting stat.
Rohit: One of the advantages we've got is that India has one of the largest talent pools and is also one of the largest countries with many Salesforce consultants and developers, so we see a good amount of opportunity within the country. A lot of organisations has invested either in Salesforce as part of their digital transformation journey or an implementation partner based in India. Ample amount of opportunity as well for the talent in India.
Theresa: Fantastic.
Lee: I think we'll start at the beginning of your career then if that's okay and you can talk us through-- I suppose we haven't started the right way here. If you can just introduce yourself in terms of who you are, what you do so that people will know.
Rohit: Yes, definitely.
Lee: Obviously, we'll share your LinkedIn profile for people that want to have a look at it after this but yes, if you introduce yourself.
Rohit: I'll start from where am I today and how did I start.
Theresa: Yes, perfect.
Rohit: Hi, everyone. I'm Rohit. I'm CTO for Venerate Solutions and one of the board members. I'm also one among very few Salesforce Certified Marketing [unintelligible 00:04:08]. From a career perspective, in the early days of my career, I was primarily engaged more into development of India's first nanosatellite. I was primarily writing real-time operating systems and was involved in the hardcore system development. I always had plans.
Having worked in a engagement where you take three to four years to build a product and launch it, I always had a feeling to explore what's there in the IT industry and how do I work on something where I can bring in agility and reduce the time to market, et cetera, and contribute quicker. That's where I started my career into Salesforce and this is somewhere around 2010.
My initial days of my career when I was training and learning myself and I was working with one of the [unintelligible 00:05:13] partner in India. For a couple of months, I should say that I felt quite disappointed and I felt that maybe I've made a wrong choice. I thought the platform to be very simple and sleek. This is again, 2010, where a lot of stuff were still coming on the platform.
Within a couple of months of me having that feeling, once I start getting deep insights around the platform and the part of possibilities, I was very sure that I made the right decision. Looking at how easy was it to solve complex business problems and contribute towards different organisational needs of basically transforming them and moving away from legacy apps and all this was just wonderful.
Lee: Sorry to jump in, but were you always technical? Were you doing computer science at college or university or something like that?
Rohit: Yes. I was always technical. I've done my engineering from a computer science background. I've got a couple of research papers published in Science Direct, et cetera.
Lee: Brilliant.
Rohit: I've got couple of papers that was published in the International Science Congress. Initial days of my career I've been primarily more of a techy. I worked primarily more on complex system design and development. I moved to IT after having done a lot of work around I would say design of an operating system, et cetera. That's why having seen the other side of the world and then after looking at the ability to do a fast-paced application development, I really enjoyed what the platform has to bring in for everyone.
Just moving ahead, I joined a consulting company called Wipro. I was there with them for a couple of years. I worked in Europe for a good amount of time. I had associated myself with different organisations primarily in pharmaceutical domain and helped them a lot in different transformations that they could bring in within their sales and marketing processes. That is when Veeva was coming up. Veeva is one of the prominent application change partner.
Worked on that for a couple of years, then I was back in India for some work and Salesforce happened. I got an opportunity to work directly with Salesforce. I spent a good amount of time working with Salesforce in India. Worked with different customers in Australia, UK, travelled quite a bit. Again was engaged in one of the first field service implementations for UK.
Lee: Oh, really?
Rohit: That is back somewhere around 2016. I became CTA while I was there working with Salesforce somewhere around 2018 and that is the year when I decided to pursue my entrepreneurship journey and I decided to move ahead and try something new, try something again from start even though the tech stack was the same but the experience and the journey is completely different.
Now we are there in India and UK, me being a CTO of Venerate. We're trading in UK and India including Bangalore and we've got a branch in another city called Mumbai which is the financial capital of India.
Lee: We need to go back. It's a good overview obviously, what you've done and where you've been, but it would be quite interesting to go back to the beginning.
Theresa: We're just curious I suppose, what was the first thing that got you into Salesforce but more importantly what was the first Salesforce project that you worked on? Obviously, you don't need to share company names or anything like that but can you give us a bit of an idea of that journey for you?
Rohit: My first project on Salesforce was for a large client, a global customer headquartered in US. From a cloud perspective, it was more around Sales Cloud that we had a lot of solutions built to help them do and plan their sales, to find their sales strategy, do their quarterly target planning, do SWOT analysis and other stuff. I started working with them, spent a couple of months engaging, working and delivering the solution for this client in the US.
Post that, I moved to work with another customer, a global customer with a strong presence in Europe, headquartered in the US that [unintelligible 00:10:38] to me. With them, I think I've worked for a fairly long time, and what really worked the best was apart from understanding the technology, when I started working with this client, I got an exposure to their business processes.
When you understand the business of a specific industry and how things work and what the pinpoints are, the chances of you advising them on something, which will be very apt for them is really [unintelligible 00:11:10] and that's what [inaudible 00:11:11]
Lee: Awesome. Forgive me if I'm asking probably a stupid question, but when you are in India and you're working on a project that's in America, what's the communication like in terms of who's speaking to the client and getting those requirements and how tricky is that for you to do?
Rohit: This is based on my working experience, concentrating on software conditions and department. You don't have to, first of all, be with the client throughout all the phases of software development life cycle. Typically, when you are working even from India, what happens is, you work directly with the client and you work from their office for a couple of weeks or months.
Before you understand what is it they need. If I have to split the phases, primarily, the consulting and discovery phase is something that happens on-site. You would have a specific member of your team who would always be there with the customer on-site, hand-holding them, understanding the [unintelligible 00:12:30] process, helping them define the 2D process, and then convert those 2D process to the right platform.
Once that has been converted, it's more about building the apps,
