Leadership Style
Leadership is really more art than science. The principles of leadership are constant but the application changes with every leader and every situation.

Anyone can steer the ship, but it takes a leader to chart the course. I believe that the foundation of building a successful company is setting the right vision and the right strategy first. Once that’s in place it’s crucial to gather the right people to execute your strategy, continually monitor and evaluate the company’s direction.

People need a goal to galvanize them. It’s very important to set goals for every individual in the organization and define the benefit of meeting those goals.

Solix started in Enterprise Application Services. When Enterprise Application Services started evaporating in the early months of 2001, we needed to quickly reset our direction. We identified a new space—Enterprise Data Management—that was product-based rather than services-based. Traditionally, building a product company requires a different culture compared to a services company and you seldom see one company doing both. It required a lot of leadership from my entire team to accomplish that, but we did.

Motivating Oneself
I always tell myself: one life, one chance. When I get to my rocking chair and am in my 80s, and when I look back, I want to feel good. I want to feel that I have done something good—good for my family, good for society. That has always been my main motivation. I remind myself of Andy Grove’s book, “Only the Paranoid Survive”. That kind of fear can be a good motivator – it definitely is for me.

Motivating Troops
Giving responsibility and believing in them is perhaps the first motivating factor for many employees. Secondly, sharing success and making sure that everyone gets a piece of the pie is the other major driver to keep morale high in a team. Food and fun are also very simple means of creating energy. Even noise is a good energy driver in the organization. Most importantly, if you can create an environment where everyone feels they have the potential for success, either in career, job satisfaction or pay growth, you will have a high-energy team.

Choosing the Right People
‘Rules of leadership’ says, you can almost guarantee success if you can work with smart people. This is perhaps the most important lesson I learnt in building my businesses. Always work with smart people, trusted people and disciplined people. Anything less than that, you are creating more work for yourself. As a CEO, I still spend bulk of my time trying to hire the right people. I put my hiring message out through my contacts because good people seldom are found in job boards. I think to be an effective CEO you have to find the right people and empower them. I like the KPI module at Digiprise. It helps Solix in setting goals for each and every department and every individual and lets you track them. That makes the life of a CEO easier as everyone is aware about their goals and measuring productivity is much simpler.

Customer Focus
The one thing I’ve learned is that customers buy from people they like. It is indeed important to build relationships with customers and always be available to solve their problems, not just sell. The technology we’re driving has a lot of impact if we deliver support on time. We’re committed to 24x7 support as we get calls worldwide. We have a world-class support system through Digiprise where we established a complete customer self-care portal with knowledge management, from issue tracking to escalations. Another big focus in the organization is to build relationships with customers.

Most Admired Companies
The last company I worked for was Cisco Systems. I’ve personally experienced the growth of Cisco, seen the energy, seen people like John Morgridge and John Chambers in cubicles, and understood how they built the company from a few million dollars to a multi-billion dollar company. There are many people who I admire— Larry Ellison at Oracle. He is a visionary. The moment he realized Oracle would be displaced to number three, after Peoplesoft’s acquisition of JD Edwards, he fought to acquire Peoplesoft and became the number-two company in the world. It was a gutsy move only Elison could have made. Infosys is another company that has beaten the challenges to rise up today. It’s not easy given the infrastructure challenges in India, but the way they came up despite all odds —kudos to the founders.

How the Road Ahead Looks
Enterprise data is growing in every company. Email, documents, custom applications and enterprise applications are adding huge amounts of data to information systems. Application performance, storage costs and data maintenance activities—all of these challenges are pushing companies to look at data archiving and purging. What’s more, data security is becoming a major challenge. The recent mishap at Time- Warner, where one of the developers posted employee information on the Web, is sending shivers across the market.

Companies want to secure confidential data to the point where not even technical or the information systems individuals can have access. Our technology around data scrambling in a dev-test environment is becoming an industry need. Solix ARCHIVE jinni is the right technology at the right time—all we need now is good execution. The challenge is how best to execute. Only time will tell.

Sai Gundavelli is the CEO of Solix Technologies, a Sunnyvale, CA based provider of enterprise data management solutions. Gundavelli, an angel investor and entrepreneur started Solix in 1995 on the principle that eighty percent of the data on an enterprises’ system is active only twenty percent of the time.

Solix has offices in North America, Europe, Middle East and Asia. Prior to founding Solix technologies, Gundavelli spearheaded several strategic initiatives and managed key product portfolios of technology leaders like CISCO Systems, Arix Corp. and Modular Integrated Systems. Gundavelli holds a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma.