Snapshots Across Time

Bio

Prasad Akella, Ph.D.

Dr. Prasad Akella is Vice President, Global SME Marketing and an SAP Ventures Fellow at SAP. He and his team are responsible for product marketing SAP’s portfolio of business management  (ERP, CRM, …) and business intelligence (BI, BPC, …) applications delivered on premise and on demand to small and medium businesses. These include SAP Business All-in-One, SAP Business ByDesign, SAP Business One and the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio.

Prasad has been an intrapreneur/entrepreneur, has worked in the US, Japan and India, has worked at companies ranging from a 3-person startup  to a Fortune 1, and has held a breadth of executive/management roles spanning from R&D and engineering through product marketing/management/strategy to M&A, business development and sales. He has created/helped create companies to introduce new product categories like social networks (for business applications), online fraud detection for financial institutions, and intelligent assist devices for factory workers. Prasad understands small and medium companies, having been a country manager (India, Borland/CodeGear), an entrepreneur (Spoke Software, Optessa and Cydelity {acquired by Digital Envoy}) and a product manager (Commerce One). His first career was in robotics, where he developed & commercialized new technologies as an engineer/intrapreneur (General Motors) and researcher (Japan’s MITI’s National Research Labs and Stanford University).

Dr. Akella holds a PhD from Stanford (Meakin Fellow; IEEE Phillips Award for doctoral research; Lincoln Silver Award for master’s project), an MBA from the Ross Business School at Michigan (highest distinction; Beta Gamma Sigma), and a BS from IIT Madras, India (HAL Prize). He has received GM’s highest technical award – the “Boss” Kettering Award – and awards from the IEEE, ASME and National Science Foundation for his work in robotics and social networks. He has three United States patents (with more under review) for his seminal work on Social Networks while at Spoke and fraud detection while at Cydelity.

p.akella at ieee.org

+1.650.384.4521