Recognizing an Engineering Leader in the Evolving Cloud: Bala Rajaraman

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Dr. Bala Rajaraman, IBM Fellow; Vice President, IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software.

All too often in the world of high tech, we are quick to accept change, evolutionary and revolutionary technologies that make subtle or dramatic improvements in business and our lives.

We revel in the advance, abandon the last version or model, adopt the new tech and move on, often not stopping to recognize the individuals who made it possible — the people behind the tech who envisioned a better way, and then made it happen. The people who put the teams together, set the course, overcame the challenges, the naysayers, and persevered.

IBM Fellow Dr. Bala Rajaraman is just such a person. I’ve worked with Bala for years and I’ve seen first-hand the difference he has made within IBM. He has held leadership positions in various roles in IBM’s cloud organization spanning public, private and hybrid. His expertise and contributions in the areas of cloud computing, data center automation, IT service management and on the IBM Z platform have been transformational to IBM and our clients.

In addition, Bala’s counsel was critical in our recent acquisition of Red Hat, and his vision and execution will continue to play a vital role as IBM and Red Hat accelerate our innovation offerings with the next-generation hybrid multicloud platform.

Bala’s expertise runs deep. He has been helping to develop a differentiated solution, based on open source technologies, that enables our enterprise clients to securely deploy, run and manage their mission critical data and applications on-premise, on private or across multiple public clouds.

His tireless work and accomplishments were recognized this past weekend when Bala received the 2019 Asian American Engineer of the Year Award for his, “leadership and original sustained contributions in the architecture and development of hybrid cloud computing technology to address to address enterprise innovation and transformation.”

To be sure, Bala’s technical contributions have enhanced IBM’s offerings and the broader open source community with tremendous innovation.

This is a well-deserved recognition for Bala – both personally and professionally. Since 2002, this prestigious industry award has been given to honor distinguished professionals for their leadership, technical achievements and remarkable public services.

As the executive co-chairs for the IBM Asian American council, Bernie Hoecker, General Manager of IBM Services and Sanjeev Nagrath, Managing Director of IBM Industry Platform, said: “We congratulate Dr. Bala Rajaraman on this tremendous accomplishment! Our council is committed to creating an inspiring environment in which our community can grow and achieve their career aspirations while accelerating IBM’s business growth and positioning. Thank you Bala for your leadership and for being a role model for all IBMers.”

As part of his community, Bala has made a positive impact by mentoring technology professionals worldwide and championing the careers of women and under-represented minorities. Coming from a background of educators, Bala truly enjoys the opportunity to engage with students and schools to help promote the value, logic and beauty of STEM disciplines.

Congratulations, Bala, for this incredible achievement and for your many years of valuable contributions to our business, clients, culture and people.