Katni is essentially in the market creation business for Sun. As an example, E*TRADE runs entirely on Sun hardware. Four years ago, Sun partnered with the budding company and as a result, according to Katni, Sun hardware now powers 75 to 80 percent of the online trading market. Even with the recent meltdown, the revenue this original partnership has generated for Sun is enormous. It’s Katni’s job, as second in command of extreme sales, to find and facilitate these kinds of strategic bets. It’s a key role for this techie-turned-strategist in a tougher economic environment, where customers are only buying for very strategic reasons.
Katni’s career thus far is a classic successful Indian engineer’s story in the United States. After earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Madras, he came to the University of Texas at Austin in 1981 with no intention of staying in America. He gave up on his Ph.D. to go work for AMD.
He tried his hand at entrepreneurship with a startup building embedded controllers, process controllers and application controllers in the Forth programming language. But C was taking off as a language, and by the time the company product came to market, Katni remembers, people asked, “Oh, you don’t do this in C?” The venture went nowhere. He says, “I got the startup thing out of my bloodstream.”
He went back to AMD and worked in Southeast Asia as a consultant and as an employee. Then he gravitated to Silicon Valley and joined Cadence, where he wanted to be an engineering manager, but ended up in the IT department, implementing ERP systems and the like. He then joined Sun’s software group, intent on getting back into engineering. Java broke, and he ended up back on the IT side, migrating the client-server architecture onto the Web. He even worked in mergers and acquisitions for the company as a technology advisor, before the creation of extreme sales in 2001.
Sun faces a tough challenge in its bid to remain one of the biggest players in the enterprise computing world, with ever-present IBM a formidable competitor, as well as perennial players HP, Compaq, Microsoft and others. Katni’s driving motivation is constantly discovering the “hot spots” of customer pain in the industry.
Katni has seen a change in Indian immigrants over the years. There is more a sense of entitlement nowadays. The expectations of the more recent immigrants are much higher. Younger immigrants coming out of India have a lot more exposure to international things. “They are a lot savvier. We were not. We were techno-geeks,” he says. As a result the recent technology downturn may have hit harder for younger Indian engineers.
Katni is philosophical. “Net-net this is not an entitlement,” he says. “You have to work at it.” He admits motivations change over a career. “As you get older, the definition of success gets spread out a little more philosophically. When you’re younger you need your next fancy car, your next house, and now you’ve got those things. Some people call it keeping up with the Joneses, but having kept up with the Joneses, now what? After people make their first couple of million the differentiation is very subtle.”
Katni’s career is still on an upswing. He’s not ready to get too philosophical. “There is an ecosystem under which I fit in,” he notes. “The ecosystem is driven by my need to provide for my happiness and my family’s happiness. At some deep level there is a need to be liked, recognized and famous.” But he downplays this last desire. Right now it’s still about sales. “I don’t care if the economy goes this way or that way,” he says. “All you care about is taking market share.”
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