Kate Valenti: Ajay, thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I’m
looking forward to learning more about your background. To get started, tell me
about the path your career has taken and how that brings you to Unicon.
Ajay Seetharaman: Sure. Thank you, Kate, first of all, for inviting me to this
forum. It's a great pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Ajay (cont'd): I worked in India for two years at a mid-sized software services company after completing my Bachelor’s in Electronics Engineering. A ton of Y2K projects were being executed but I was lucky enough to be assigned projects related to product development for a Japanese engineering giant.
Around this time the travel bug bit me and I grabbed an opportunity in Singapore to build a securities trading platform. It was a new domain for me and a new mix of technologies.
I came to the US in 2000. Over the last 25 years, I’ve worked in several verticals, from Retail, Banking, and Hi-Tech to Ed-Tech. Along the way, I lived in several cities across the US and met some wonderful people. Building software products for the retail sector (Space, Merchandise Planning, Trade, and Marketing spend optimization) was exciting. I found delivering software solutions using geographically dispersed teams, for clients across the globe, at varying scales both challenging and deeply rewarding.
The Ed-Tech space has been my home for the last 15 years. I have worked with large publishers like Cengage, Pearson K-12, and Savvas Learning. I was with Magic, an Ed-Tech focused services and consulting firm before joining Unicon.
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At Unicon, I’ve had the pleasure of working on several projects in a Project Management capacity, in the Critical Infrastructure LOB under Dave Mendez and the Learner Applications and Experience LOB under Patty Wolfe. Each practice serves different needs and solves different problems, but I’ve found that the insights and learnings cross-pollinate, making the execution more efficient and both practices more robust.
In my view, to get successful outcomes we must focus on three things:
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Keeping the customer at the center. Do the best that you can to support them. Guide them whenever you can and build relationships. They shouldn’t feel that they are dealing with a consultant but rather, a true partner invested in their success. In that, you’ll find your success.
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Equally important is supporting your team by ensuring they have everything they need to execute well and avoid minefields. These are smart people with top-notch skills and loads of experience. Although they may not emote a lot, they are human beings and have to deal with life’s issues too. Take care of them.
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Sustained profitable growth is key to any company. While filling the sales pipeline has traditionally been the role of the business development team, as consultants in the software service world, each of us can and should contribute. Many engineers and project managers may recoil at the mention of sales, but I see it as listening intently to a customer’s needs, identifying areas of growth, and offering services to help them meet their goals as efficiently and effectively as possible. The project team is ideally situated to identify and fulfill this need.
Kate: What is it about education technology that has kept you engaged for so long? Is it an industry specific interest?
Ajay: I worked in the retail technology sector for a good part of my career before an opportunity in 2010 drew me to the world of EdTech. Learning about logistics, the supply chain, and retail planning was great. Understanding consumer behavior across geographies, economic cycles, and time and how to grab their attention is an education in itself.
Growing up, after our families and friends, teachers have a significant influence on our lives, don’t they? A good teacher finds a way to make subjects come to life in a way that hooks your attention and lights a spark. This is a noble profession. Providing teachers with good material and new ways to engage and keep students interested and curious is both challenging and deeply fulfilling at the same time. In a small way, the work each of us does in the Education Technology space contributes towards making the coming generations well-equipped to meet the challenges of life. Collectively, we are helping build a good, stable, and humane society. It’s this larger purpose that attracted me to this space and has kept me invested.
