In the 72nd episode of Burning Platform, we host Sayan Chakraborty, EVP of Product and Technology at Workday.
Sayan is, in many ways, a rocket scientist. He has degrees in aerospace engineering from MIT. He started his career as an engineer on interplanetary spacecraft at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and on the early commercialization of global positioning systems (GPS).
However, in his career he has influenced more of the arc of enterprise software. He arrived at Workday in 2015 through their acquisition of GridCraft which he co-founded. Prior to that, he led teams focused on next-generation collaboration products at Oracle. Leading up to that he worked at several startups for two decades
So, the conversation is a bit of a walk down memory lane. We invoke terms like SOA, CPU speeds and OLTP as we discuss today’s microservices and how Workday deals with scaling of massive transaction volumes across finance, hcm, procurement functions while also becoming a powerhouse in the planning/analytics space.
We have a bit of a debate on whether consumer tech is leading enterprise tech when it comes to ML and AI. That leads to threads on data regimes and bias in AI.
We have an interesting section on the need to rethink enterprise application categories and definitions, to break down traditional silos and to rethink business processes. As he says, the pandemic has forcefully shown us an enterprise is not just a “campus of buildings”. He discusses how Workday’s string of acquisitions has already helped challenge some of the traditional thinking.
This a master class on IT architectures. You can see and hear Sayan's high-energy and passion for his role in shaping the industry in his body language and tone.
An absolute must watch.
