C V Subramanyam

Subramanyam is a successful serial entrepreneur who co-founded one of India's largest transportation and logistics organizations. The next venture he co-founded was in the realty sector and built a reputation for quality constructions. In 1999, he co-founded Chakkilam Infotech. Chakkilam Infotech is a recognized pioneer in medical transcription in Hyderabad and the HIPAA compliance product developed by Chakkilam was a pioneering effort to build software products in India. Subramanyam successfully took the company public in 2004. He is currently steering the company as it transitions to an independent testing services company.

Mark Ferguson

Mark has over 25 years experience in working for leading technology companies and has worked in most of the major European countries. Initially working in the Defence sector, he started his career as a rocket scientist, developing software for computer guided missile systems. Always aware of the need for software testing, he developed an interest in software test automation, culminating in the transition into the nascent software testing services industry in the mid 1990's.

Mark joined IS Integration, one of the UK's leading testing services providers, becoming Practice Manager before making the transition to Mercury Interactive (now HP), the leading provider of commercial testing software products. At Mercury, Mark worked in the technical sales function, selling performance testing, test management and automation solutions and services to many of the largest companies in the UK.

Returning to IS Integration, Mark took on a wide remit within the Business Development function to expand and strengthen the company's range of service offerings. During this period, IS Integration was acquired by AppLabs, a global software testing services firm. Mark became a key player in the corporate integration and subsequent rebranding, becoming global Testing Services Manager.

Prior to joining Chakkilam, Mark was Head of UK Delivery at FocusFrame, a Hexaware subsidiary and a global specialist in software test automation.

Sriram Rajaram

Sriram has spent the last 19 years in IT consulting, delivery management, project management and training management. Sriram co-founded Primora Software Testing, an organization focused on software testing education.

Sriram was interim COO at K7 Computing a software product company in the security space. During his tenure, K7 Computing's VirusSecurity became the second largest selling anti virus product in Japan. K7 Computing's TotalSecurity became India's first Microsoft Vista Certified product.

Prior to K7 Computing, Sriram was an independent consultant and created RAPID (Requirements Analysis, Prototyping and Interactive Design), a proprietary methodology to gather software requirements from business users. RAPID helps the IT team to elicit business requirements directly from their key stakeholders so that "what IT builds" is "what business wants".

Sriram joined Virtusa in the year 2000 when it was 5 people and helped it grow to 1600 people in India. He was a Delivery Head and later Head of Shared Services at Virtusa. At Virtusa, Sriram also led one of India's most successful BOT (Build Operate Transfer) engagements for Convergys Information Management Group a 300 person team that develops and maintains Convergys' flagship telecom billing product. Before joining Virtusa, Sriram was the Head of Technology at Focus Infotech and Head of Curriculum Design at First Computers.

Murali Iyer

Murali has more than 18 years of experience in Software Development & Quality Assurance. Murali worked in large product companies like Yahoo India and led testing teams in services companies like Tavant Technologies. He was also one of the early leaders at RelQ, a test only services company that was acquired by EDS.

Murali has implemented, managed and directed more than 60 Projects (25 automation projects, 15 performance testing projects (Loadrunner/Silk Performer), 10 software development projects and multiple software testing projects.

Murali's primary skill set is Test Project Management, Building Test Automation Frameworks, Tools – Winrunner/QTP, Open Source Tools, Performance Engineering, Performance Testing using Loadrunner, JMeter UNIX, C, Oracle, Perl, PHP and Java technologies – in addition to setting up and managing a testing organization. He has built test harnesses using many open source tools and continues to explore new tools like Selenium as they evolve.

Murali has strong test automation and API testing skills. He has been actively involved in performance testing, understanding software architecture and identifying performance bottlenecks, scalability and capacity planning of enterprise IT applications. He loves to program, train and mentor testers and continues to be hands on in consulting engagements.

Advisory Board

Madhu Murty Ronanki

A recognized expert in software testing, Madhu has over 22 years of experience in different roles. He has worked in a Software Product Company, Test-only IT Services Company and IT Consulting Company.

Madhu co-founded Primora Software Testing, an organization focused on software testing education. Prior to Primora, Madhu headed Accenture’s Testing Practice in India with more than 3600 test practitioners in multiple locations across the country. Apart from building Accenture's testing competency, he played an active role in pitching to large enterprise clients and helping delivery managers manage their testing engagements.

Madhu also served as the SVP Technical Services at AppLabs where he headed worldwide delivery of the world's largest independent software testing services company with more than 1500 resources under him.

Madhu headed Virtusa's Global Testing Practice between 2000 and 2005 and was also the Delivery Head for Virtusa's BFSI delivery unit. Virtusa is a $170 Million mid-sized IT services company with more than 4500 resources worldwide.

Before Virtusa, Madhu was the Head of Product Testing at Baan, an ERP product company based out of Netherlands. Over the past twenty years, Madhu has focused his attention to building strong delivery & testing capability organizations. He continues to play an active role in the testing industry by speaking at many testing conferences and forums on the need for independent testing services & the future of the testing industry.