Enterprise IT that runs
lean, secure, and always on.

Arriving before the foundations existed

I joined Amplifon India in February 2010 as a consultant. The India arm of the group was early-stage — a young retail business with real ambition and very little technology underneath it. There was no established IT function to inherit. That turned out to be the opportunity: I wasn't maintaining someone else's architecture, I was deciding what it should be.

What I learned: when nothing exists yet, judgment matters more than tooling.

Building the machine — Manager to Senior Manager

These were the construction years. I virtualized the physical server estate on VMware and cut infrastructure cost by roughly 60% while improving availability — proof, early on, that doing it well and doing it cheaply weren't opposites. I put in the plumbing that a growing retail business quietly depends on: IT operations frameworks, SLAs, change management, periodic application reviews.

Then came the acquisitions. Three separately-branded businesses — around 90 clinics — each with its own systems, data, and habits, each to be folded onto our core platform. They came in different years, as separate projects. Every one landed on its committed timeline despite third-party delays, and we absorbed all three without adding headcount.

What I learned: doing something once is luck; doing it three times is a capability.

Taking the function

I became Head of IT for the India business, reporting to the Country Head, with the full technology mandate: infrastructure, network, cybersecurity, enterprise applications, governance, and multi-site operations. From that year onward, the IT function has been recognised company-wide as Best Function — every single year.

I also began representing India at the group's APAC IT forum, presenting our projects and annual budget planning alongside the Group CIO and Group IT Directors. Local execution, worldwide standards.

What I learned: the mandate isn't given with the title. It's earned in the first hard quarter.

Replacing the engine while the car was moving

The big one: re-architecting a legacy monolith into an Azure-hosted microservices platform — .NET Core, Angular, Azure SQL — with Deloitte as systems integrator. I owned it from enterprise architecture and UAT through a phased rollout across 240+ live retail locations, and out the other side into post-go-live stabilization.

It went live with zero unplanned downtime. Not "minimal." Zero. For a business where every store hour is revenue, that number was the whole point.

Around it we deployed Cisco Meraki SD-WAN across 125+ sites — standardizing connectivity nationwide and tightening security — and moved critical server infrastructure to the cloud inside a two-day weekend window against a planned four-day outage. Half the downtime, no disruption to the business.

What I learned: a cutover nobody notices is the highest compliment engineering gets.

Lean by choice, not by constraint

I reduced IT operating costs by 30% through vendor renegotiation and consolidation, then held roughly 15% year-on-year savings after that through cost-effective solution design and disciplined vendor governance. I also replaced our legacy ticketing tool with ServiceNow and rebuilt ITSM around it — moving from basic ticket logging to genuinely governed service management, and reaching 98.5% SLA within three months across 240+ locations.

Through all of it, the team stayed small. That was deliberate. A lean, high-leverage in-house team plus a properly governed ecosystem of vendors and integrators outperforms headcount — if you do the governing well.

What I learned: efficiency isn't what you do when the budget is tight. It's a design choice.

Data, decisions, and AI on honest terms

I built a live Power BI decision-intelligence layer for the Country Head and India leadership team — sales and operations KPIs, marketing-channel and funnel analytics, store and salesperson performance, and a forecast simulator — replacing manual reporting with dashboards leaders actually use.

Then AI. I brought it into IT delivery deliberately and carefully: AI-assisted methods to accelerate internal dashboard and reporting work, under a secure-by-default posture where no confidential data goes to public AI platforms. Early, pragmatic, ROI-first — not a press release.

In July 2026 that work was recognised externally: Winner — Emerging Data & Leader of the Year at the Data & GenAI Summit & Awards, organised by UBS Forums.

What I learned: "emerging" is an honest word. I'd rather earn the next one than claim it early.

Where it stands

The business I joined as an early-stage operation is now 240+ retail locations and a market leader. The IT foundation underneath it is one I built, ran, and kept honest for sixteen years — through five levels of progression, three acquisitions, one full platform rebuild, and a lot of quiet Sundays.

Sixteen years in one place isn't standing still. It's what it looks like when you own the outcome instead of the project.