‘I want to run a global company. Not a US one with an Irish outpost’
Sudhakar Ramakrishna, the CEO of SolarWinds which employs 200 people in Ireland.
As CEO of a firm that helps companies manage and monitor their computer and technology systems, Sudhakar Ramakrishna has had a bird's eye view of the dramatic changes that have occurred in offices during the global pandemic.
Speaking to the Irish Examiner from SolarWinds European headquarters in Cork on his first visit abroad since restrictions were lifted he said he is eager to begin expanding the company's global footprint again with Ireland a key element of that progress.
The company had reached 200 staff in Ireland, nearly all of them located in Cork and had taken out new office space for expansion just prior to the pandemic. They first set up operations in Cork in 2007 becoming the first tenants of the City Gate campus. since then the company has expanded and Cork now encompasses every function the company operates.
“Ireland and to a large degree Cork is in many ways a microcosm of of the entire company," Ramakrishna said. "Almost every function at SolarWinds is somehow represented here. Sales and marketing, finance, IT, real estate, customer success and support. They all have a presence here." He said they do not view Ireland or Cork as an outpost.
"Cork is our international headquarters supporting customers all over and also companies in the US. A lot of the functions run here are global functions. We are truly trying to be a global company with leadership globally where we can continuously learn from the best experiences and the best environments.
“I want to run a global company. Not a US company, that's got a global presence. Those are two different things." He points to the example of SolarWinds' global head of sales and marketing who runs the entire department from Cork and not from the company's headquarters in Austin Texas.
With a background in security, Ramakrishna was announced as Solarwinds' new leader in December 2020 and it can be argued that no CEO in history has had a baptism of fire as he had. Within days of the announcement and weeks before he was due to start in the role, SolarWinds found itself at the centre of a major international hack event.
Blamed on Russian hackers it was initially reported that as many as 18,000 companies were impacted. SolarWinds said that ultimately fewer than 100 were impacted. Ramakrishna has been seen as a steadying hand on the company.
He said that security remains a huge priority for the world's IT infrastructure and a key element of the work in SolarWinds. "I come from a security background and some companies still look at security as a thing that is added on top of an environment. You shouldn’t be worrying about security as a bespoke thing. It has to be embedded, baked into everything."
"When you buy a car, for instance, you don't pay extra to get good quality cars. You assume that the car has a quality, so security has be similar to that."
The pandemic itself and the global move towards remote working has transformed the way IT systems are deployed and managed something he has witnessed through their hundreds of thousands of customers.
For a company like SolarWinds, the move by millions of people to work from home has been a significant challenge.
"Firstly, it was customers who were scrambling to figure out how to make sense of the new world order and how to be effective. So that was the first order of duty. The second thing was that customers have now become wiser saying, okay, maybe this will be the new order and so what should we be doing as we evolve into the future? How should we think about like deployment of our resources, our technology management."
“User preferences have shot through the roof. ‘I want to use my own app’. ‘I want to use my own device.’ Added to that is the complexity of not managing one environment, but managing as many environments, as there are employees. If each one of us is working from home, it's tough to standardise every one of our environments. Exactly the same way. So that builds another complexity and then business needs have continued to change."
While the company's headcount stayed at 2000 throughout the pandemic, Ramakrishna said he now believes it is time to begin expanding again. "There is capacity within our organisation for perhaps 10% more than what we are already doing. So 200 becomes 220."
"One of my goals or aspiration is to potentially expand our engineering capability within Ireland. My experience in Ireland is that it is very rich in software engineering capabilities. If I look at SolarWinds in Ireland today that might be one function that’s not as well represented as it can be."
"One thing you notice in Cork is that people love working with one another. They are becoming more friends than colleagues. So there's a sense of togetherness. The more we can nurture that, the more we can foster that then recruiting actually becomes effective."
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