Guru Padmanabhan is a technology, product marketing, channel and sales leader with 30+ years of experience in leadership positions in leading telecom and technology bell weathers such as Etisalat, du, Amazon, IBM, Tech Data and Citi group covering the Middle East, Africa, North America and India markets. He is currently the Chief Digital Officer at Pinestraw Technologies a digital transformation platform and services startup focused in helping SME's transform and succeed. He is currently consulting with leading telecom providers and ISP's in Africa driving their enterprise digital, carrier and retail marketing strategies. He is highly techno commercial, with a methodical and analytical approach to planning and executing business plans. He was responsible for technology, vision and strategy, marketing and P&L encompassing advanced technologies such as super scale data centers, globally scalable storage grids, global network infrastructure, high density web operations, information security methodologies and frameworks, cloud engineering and network and application optimization technologies at various times during his career. He has led large ethno centric and highly competitive, high energy teams successfully in delivering sustaining business and stake holder value.Guru has also been a leading spokesperson and an avid writer for the Middle East technology media on several topics covering information security, data centers, networking and storage domains. He was rated in the top 10 channel influencers (6th) in the Middle East region by Network World Middle East magazine in the networking domain in 2011.He has a BSc from University of Mumbai, executive MBA from Haas at University of California at Berkeley, exec program from Los Positos college (University of California), and has had several technology certifications such as CCDA, MCNE, MCSE, ASE, HP Star, Brainbench, CISA, PMP, Certified ISO internal auditor and other industry certifications.