Industry Advisors
Balaji Kesavaraj
Balaji Kesavaraj is the Director – Platform Strategy for Microsoft India. Balaji has responsibility for leading Microsoft’s sales and marketing motion with Open Source Software (OSS) and engaging open source communities. He also leads cloud consumption from OSS technologies and the bridge between the field and engineering for OSS related product development and enhancement. In his previous role in Microsoft he was the Director of Developer Audience Marketing in the Developer & Platform Evangelism team in Microsoft India. He drove all cross-marketing efforts targeted at Developers and IT Professionals, including marquee events like TechEd.
Balaji has done his business management from IIM Calcutta and holds a Masters in Economics. He has over 19 years of experience in marketing and brand management.
Asheem Bakhtawar
Asheem Bakhtawar is the Regional director, India, Middle East and Africa at 2nd Quadrant, the world’s leading authority on the open source PostgreSQL RDBMS. With a rich experience of more than 18 years in the IT industry, Asheem has taken it as a responsibility for himself to be a self-proclaimed promoter of open source. His enthusiasm and grit towards the promotion of open source is both magnetic as well as charismatic.
Community Advisors
Divyanshu Verma
Divyanshu is Sr. Engineering Manager Intel RnD, Bangalore. He is an alumnus of IIT-Delhi and IIM-Bangalore. Divyanshu has extensively worked in product development organizations and has extensive experience in developing world class enterprise products in technologies such as Linux kernel development, Virtualization, embedded Linux, cyber security, IoT etc. Divyanshu holds 2 patents in the area of memory design and has been speaker at multiple International and National Conferences, such as Linux Symposium Ottawa, OSI Days, IEEE conferences, OpenStack Day etc. His current areas of interest are Cyber Security, IoT, Wireless communication etc.
Dhiraj Khare
A passionate open source advocate and practitioner, Dhiraj started his career in Media, Sales and Advertising with the EFY Group. Since then, he has led many teams and coached and advised many startups as part of his role as the Sales & Marketing leader in various companies. He is instrumental in establishing Taashee’s operations in Bangalore.
Currently he works for Liferay India as National Alliance Manager. In this role, he is working towards creating a strong ecosystem for developers & partners across country around Liferay. foothold for Open Source technologies in the government sector. He is involved in many ongoing eGovernance projects in Southern and Western states of the Indian sub-continent.
Dhiraj holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering. He has deep understanding of various Database, Platform, Middleware and Cloud technologies such as Postgres, Jboss, OpenStack, RHEV, Vmware, Cloud Forms and Nagios. He has been associated with Open Source India for more than seven years.
Apart from being a hard core Sales professional, he loves to share technical knowledge with young aspirants. Led by this interest, he often makes time to visit various technology and management institutes as guest lecturer. Some of the topics he likes to speak on are:
– Strategy Vs. Execution
– Business Models Around Open Source
– Technology and Good Governance
– Simplifying Entrepreneurship – Common Startup Challenges
Janardan Revuru
Janardan Revuru is JavaScript evangelist and open source contributor. He is a Computer Science Engineer and MBA in Marketing. He has been working on Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) and Data Protection (DP) management software products at HPE & Dell EMC. He is passionate about web technologies, open source software and agile software development. He has been author and speaker at national and international conferences. He is currently web community evangelist in Microsoft Web Technology Advisory Group and co-organizer of the most popular JavaScript Meetup which has 3000+ members.
Dibya Prakash
Dibya is a technology consultant, mentor & strategist. With a deep experience of working across the ladder in the services and consulting sector, with roles ranging from enterprise consultant to technology head. Dibya consults several CMM5 & Fortune 100/500 companies across different countries, for their different technology, engineering & process requirements.
Dibya has been using collaborative implementation model, uses lean technologies & processes for better technical and business process management. An advocate of open source & futuristic technologies, Dibya supports community projects, helps organization/business units adopt open source technologies for their product or service needs. He sits in the advisory board of a few start-ups working on niche products and technologies.