In this month’s KORE Connections edition, we’re thrilled to spotlight KORE’s Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Analytics, Tushar Sachdev. With a passion for pushing boundaries, Tushar leads the charge in shaping the future of IoT, harnessing analytics, and driving transformative innovation.
Q: What’s a common misconception of the IoT space?
A: The biggest misconception about IoT is treating this as another technology in itself. What I mean by that is there is no mastery over IoT – such as how one can learn a piece of technology, get certified and then start contributing in various ways. IoT is always and will always be associated with a deep understanding of the domain itself. Without a deep understanding of healthcare, one cannot easily implement a remote patient monitoring solution using IoT technologies. Without a deep understanding of an Industrial setup such as a gas turbine, one cannot implement an IoT solution around it. The same goes for other use cases.
Moreover, there is technology and overall “solution development” that one needs to keep in mind – devices, network, logistics, data transport, cleansing, normalising – all this before you can do the fun part of monitoring the health of an industrial equipment and predict failure using machine learning. Most IoT use cases fail to scale due to very naive understanding of what is needed and the lack of “solution development.”
Q: What has been the biggest challenge in your current position?
A: Well, there are many mega challenges – from keeping our customers always online with their IoT solutions, to ensuring the data and our infrastructure are secure, to supporting them to easily deploy, manage, and scale their deployments. However, the biggest challenge by far is to ensure reliability, security and resilience is built into our customer’s solutions that are created on our infrastructure such that it can scale as they grow.
The business case for IoT is massive, the challenge however has been ensuring a scalable “back-end” for which to grow. The cloud hyperscalers only provide part of the answer, the rest is KORE. At KORE we have positioned ourselves as the leading IoT Hyperscaler, and my job is to ensure we hold to that promise.
Q: Professionally speaking, what was the hardest lesson you have learned so far?
A: Technology is a hard job. While there is glamour when we speak and take joy in the initial deployment, there’s an inevitable element of pain as we implement it, roll it out or even retire it. This requires hard decisions to be made. For technology leaders, a crucial lesson is realising you can’t please everyone. It is important to remember that the true north star in your daily technology activities, must be shareholder value. Whether building, expanding or retiring technologies, you will ultimately end up making some people unhappy. This is something out of your control.
However, the guiding principle should be broader – for profit-led companies it will be shareholder value, which in turn drives the company’s strategy. By aligning your actions with this value, you are good and will be rewarded in the long-term.
Q: What does a successful day at work look like to you?
A: With the different facets of my job (Engineering to Infrastructure and Strategy to Products)– it is hard for me to measure success at a day level. I prefer looking at the week to gauge whether I was successful or not. A successful week means all systems have good operating metrics, we have delivered some meaningful product features that can have an impact on the customer, and I have spent time on at least one strategic area for the company. If I can get to these, I consider it a good week!
Q: What’s something you’re proud of?
A: I am proud of the achievements we’ve had as a team in my 5 years here at KORE. We have nearly doubled the revenue while increasing profitability margins. We have completed 5 successful acquisitions, driven a massive technology transformation, become leaders in the IoT connectivity space with our eSIM investments, created some fundamentally game-changing products, and created great partnerships with AWS and GCP to name a few. Of course, amidst all this, we did go public and raise investments to name a few accomplishments. However, I am sure if I sit back and reflect on this more, the list would be even longer. It has been and continues to be a fun ride at KORE for our technology and products.
Q: What is one word you would use to describe KORE and why?
A: IoT Hyperscaler. IoT is hard and it is not until people start working on it that they realise there are many facets to managing an IoT transformation. IoT requires hardware, connectivity, data management, application integration, logistics and every aspect of this is complex. To deploy, manage and scale such solutions requires the same feat that cloud computing did to traditional data centers. The cloud, led by the cloud Hyperscalers, led to the wave of SaaS revolution. In the same way, KORE will lead the way for the IoT revolution or as it is called the Decade of IoT, by providing a set of IoT-centric services to drive ease of deploy, manage and scale in IoT.
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In a world obsessed with connections, from fast streaming services, to building personal networks, to even connected cities and homes, it is the personal connections that matter the most – that is why we are proud to introduce KORE Connections. This forum is a Q&A series where our thought leaders and innovators can share their perspectives on life, innovations, and business which could help you in building your own connections.