Anand Athreya, CEO and MD Designate, Tejas Networks
As chief executive officer (CEO) and managing director (MD) designate at Tejas Networks, Anand Athreya works with the senior leadership team at the company to help transform the networking industry.
“My responsibility is to put India on the global networking equipment industry map as the foremost supplier of innovative and cutting-edge products and solutions,” says Athreya.
His mandate is to execute the company’s vision to create a global-scale original equipment manufacturer for telecom and networking equipment. “In order to achieve this, I will be leveraging my extensive experience and expertise in developing and delivering world-class products and solutions for both the domestic and international markets,” he says.
Prior to Tejas, Athreya was executive vice-president and chief development officer at Juniper Networks in the US. In the past, he has worked in diverse management roles at Procket Networks, Malibu Networks and Tiara Networks, and has held senior engineering positions at Novell.
He recalls his most memorable assignment as establishing a fully automated, efficient, end-to-end integration and deployment process for all phases of the software development lifecycle, ranging from conception to production, across all the product lines and operating systems at Juniper. According to Athreya, the launch of 5G has unleashed a massive multi-year capex cycle in wireline and wireless network infrastructure in India and worldwide. In order to cater to the consequent bandwidth surge, both communications service providers and enterprises will continue to augment the capacities of their metro and backbone networks by investing in terabit-scale optical transmission, packet switching and routing equipment, he believes.
“Recent geopolitical developments, the government’s strong push for realising the vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat in telecom, and the growing softwarisation and disaggregation trends have created an excellent opportunity for Indian companies such as Tejas to capture a meaningful portion of the $200 billion annual worldwide spend on network equipment,” he notes.
Athreya believes in frugal innovation and prefers creating small teams that work on resolving specific problems. “My main strength is that I am very focused and execution-driven,” he says.
Athreya’s family comprises his wife and their two children. His leisure activities include reading (mainly non-fiction), music, photography, and long walks with family and friends.
