Published on 23, Nov 2022

Meet the Digital Transformation Expert - Aiyappa Machanda

LOS ANGELES, California – In the midst of the pandemic, businesses realized the value of digital transformation which involved integrating digital technologies into the business operation to change the way in which the company operates and although this appears challenging and disruptive we find that there are many benefits of doing this which could help boost the overall success of the business.

We recently interviewed Aiyappa Machanda, Global Enablement Lead at Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions who is an IT professional helping with digital transformation projects globally.

Hi there, Aiyappa! So glad to be connecting. Can you give the readers a general understanding of what a Digital transformation expert handles exactly?

“I work to enable our partners and fortune 500 companies digitally transform their complex ERP customer landscapes to the cloud by providing best practices to help them move from on-premise solutions to the Cloud for better agility, meaning a lower overall ownership cost for the customer and more effective innovative solutions. Also assisting customers to integrate resources and systems across their value chains to support cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground integrations. Expanding value with Cloud extensions as well by offering guided contextual experiences by providing pre-built industry content to process workflows and automate across business ecosystems."

Can you expand on that? What are the deeper implications of that for the business?

“We give our customers pre-built industry content to break workflows down and automate several different business ecosystems and provide near to zero downtime migrations which help their businesses become intelligent enterprises to transact, analyze and predict in real-time in an increasingly unpredictable world.”

“We accomplish this with strong, proven methods such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, and Blockchains. We also deploy and maintain the infrastructure for our customers in the cloud so they don’t have to worry about capacity issues or spend time and resources to maintain and monitor their Infrastructure workloads.”

Where are you from, and how did you get into the industry?

“I come from a small Coffee growing community called Kodagu located in the Southwestern part of India. I was raised in Bangalore which is the IT capital of India, I was 7 when I was first introduced to technology while gaming on my dad’s computer. Since then, there has been no looking back as technology intrigued me. I was always looking for better ways to implement tried and tested methods be it academics or sports. I earned my Bachelor’s in Engineering from a University in Bangalore and started my career path in IT after I was recruited by SAP as a Software Engineer. I worked in SAP labs India for 5 years on the database, analytics, and integration technologies before being transferred internally to the SAP US subsidiary. I joined AWS earlier this year to continue my passion for transformative projects and I feel my life has come full circle and it couldn’t get better than this.”

What has been the core focus of your work while working in the States?

“In the US I actively worked directly with some of the top fortune 500 companies enabling their digital transformation to the cloud and helping companies integrate and move their mission-critical applications to the cloud. After 12 years of working for SAP in various big data analytics, data warehouse, procurement, and Integration technologies, I left to join Amazon Web services, Inc to further help realize the massive potential of moving ERP solutions to the AWS cloud. With a deep understanding of both SAP technology and AWS, I provide strategic recommendations for a highly reliable, highly resilient, and well-architected framework for our customer’s ERP investments.”

What other activities do you do during your spare time?

“I’m a proud dad of 2 little girls and they keep me on my toes. Apart from spending time with my family, I like to contribute back to our society by inspiring students to pursue their passion for technology. I enjoy mentoring young enthusiastic students and professionals in tech and judge hackathons for university grads whenever I can.”

The views expressed here are of Aiyappa Machanda and do not represent anyone else or his company.