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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

June - 2006 - issue > How I Got Where I am Today

Innovate and rejuvenate

Mohammed Shariff
Thursday, June 1, 2006
Mohammed Shariff
Pradip Kulkarni’s moment of reckoning came early in life during his one-month stay at Intel office in Santa Clara, U.S. Sited there by his first employer, Godrej, to learn the Research and Development strategies on the 486 chipset, he was charmed by the professional atmosphere there which changed his life altogether and he decided to concentrate more on innovation. “I saw a big picture of Intel 486 architecture on the front door and was stunned, for a few moments” he says. In those days, Godrej, one of India’s largest diversified conglomerate, was one of the few companies involved in cutting edge R&D on Unix platform and had deployed Intel chipsets.

Back in India, Kulkarni realized that Godrej was not progressing with the project. He felt he did not do anything innovative nor could help the company in increasing its revenues and left Godrej to join NCR.

But he was disillusioned with NCR too. “I was in a rut. We weren’t doing anything creative, just repeating the same work,” says Kulkarni.

He came back to India in 1993 and declined an offer from Wipro for a project in Austin, Texas. He preferred staying home rather than go back to the U.S. However he quickly absorbed a chance to work at the then newly launched Pune Development Center of VERITAS Software in 1994. As luck would have it, and then there was no looking back.

As a startup, VERITAS offered its employees new challenges in technology and the work culture spearheaded Kulkarni to innovate cutting edge technology, even without appropriate support. When the company created the next generation data architecture with support from a global team, Kulkarni built the technology capability with non-traditional ways, similar to his student days when his classmates would ponder over previous years question papers to prepare for examinations he would pick up books from the library and study randomly to perform better than his classmates.


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