Pratik Tidke

Group Product Manager leading the cloud and AI portfolio at TCL, with significant roles and responsibilities, including.

• Developing a go-to-market strategy for the cloud portfolio to drive product adoption.
• Enhancing and building new product features through effective MVP releases, improving user experience.
• Establishing competitive pricing models based on cost and value analysis.
• Conducting customer demonstrations, and successfully acquiring new clients.

Problem Statement: Build an agile and robust public cloud offering comparable to hyperscalers, such as AWS.

Outcome:

• Set up infrastructure in the TCL data center with apt capacity planning: CPU, RAM, and storage (block and object).
• Implement virtualization using hypervisors, such as VMware and OpenStack.
• Orchestrate systems to enable self-service capabilities for customers through the TCL Indigenous portal.
• Provide value-added services, including:
• Cloud security wrapper: WAF, Next Gen Firewall, Micro-segmentation.
• Networking solutions: Dedicated Public Cloud Connectivity, VPN.
• Build and contribute to the cloud portfolio with a current ARR of $40 million.

Problem Statement: Build and introduce a new AI Cloud offering to provide Infrastructure as a Service, with large-scale GPU infrastructure, scalable storage, and a network to support a zettabyte of data.

Outcome:

• Collaborated with Nvidia to set up a total of 50 GPUs, with a mix of H100s, L40s, and L4s
• Worked with Nvidia to understand the infrastructure requirements: Colo, Storage, Power, and offering cost, and set up the same in our own infrastructure.
• Set up GPU as a service using KVM as a hypervisor for customer provisioning.
• Prepared BC for the entire CAPEX investment and sought approval at the CXO level.
• Prepared GTM strategy and feature offering for the customer.
• As of now, we have onboarded 5 POC customers; the noted ones are CoROver.ai, BharatGPT

Problem Statement: Build an agile and robust white-labeled solution for SD-WAN for OEM vendors like Cisco, Viptela, Versa, and Fortinet.

Outcome:

• Achieved a recurring revenue of $5 million in the span of 2 years from bootstrapping mode.
• Bundled and deployed SD-WAN with other security services such as ZTNA, FWaaS, and CASB over AWS cloud: SASE offering.
• Sound knowledge in underlay network connectivity offerings, like lease lines, MPLS, and enterprise broadband.
• Created an indigenous offering by building the wrapper APIs for all the networking products and exposing them to customers (MEF standard) using a Kubernetes cluster.
• Initiated and built marketing collaterals and GTM strategy with sales for hunting activities and other CFTs.
• Acted as Product Owner for the SDWAN ordering journey (L2O and O2C) on the TCL customer journey portal, defining user stories, building wireframes, and executing with engineering.

Problem Statement: Build indigenous IP in the SDN-NFV domain, which will help to deploy and monitor network edge devices.

Outcome:

• Built a one-size-fits-all deployment product, 'NETBOTS,' which will help to configure network products, such as SDWAN edge routers, and perform testing using pre-defined test adapters.
• The IP product NETBOTS was built using the NFV MANO stack, with ONAP/OSM as an orchestrator.
• Test adaptors were defined using protocols like YANG, NETCONF, etc.
• Built the product outline from a GTM perspective (pricing, offering, feature analysis).
• In-depth knowledge of the NFVI+MANO architecture (OpenStack, orchestrators like ONAP and OSM, AWS).
• Collaborated with IIT Madras, CEWIT R&D center, for the first 5G testbed testing in India.
• Built and published insights for SD-WAN/networking products indigenous to organizational developments.
• Built and created use cases like vCPE, vEPC, and vFirewall into GA using the NFVI technologies.

Problem Statement: Facilitated migration from the existing ITSM tool, OTS (Oracle Tele Services), to the new tool, BMC Remedy.

Outcome:

• Helped the client migrate to BMC Remedy within a span of a record 1 year.
• During the journey, I gained expertise in the BMC Remedy Developer tool. And Oracle PLSQL module for data migration.
• Gained domain knowledge for OSS-BSS systems, with an architectural framework in the telecom industry.