Rajashree Varma, Vice President Of Alliances at Xoriant, was recognized by Cloud Girls, in collaboration with the Alliance of Channel Women, as a Trailblazer in the seventh annual Cloud Girls Rising “Women to Watch” awards announced in April of 2022.
The Cloud Girl Rising awards were created to honor women in the telecom and IT channel who have shown leadership and innovation in the emerging cloud space as well as to inspire more women to step forward and follow their example.
Varma was honored as a Trailblazer, a female technology industry veteran who is paving the way for her organization, customers and industry in advancing cloud and next-generation technology solutions. Trailblazers are recognized as role models and mentors to colleagues and others at work and the partner community.
Cloud Girls is pleased to share more about Raj in this edited excerpt from her award application.
What one example shows how you have innovated in the cloud space and shunned the status quo?
Xoriant has been a successful product consulting company for 30 years. This success was achieved despite, Xoriant not having any prior experience working with one of the largest partner ecosystems such as Microsoft. To address this lack of experience, Raj developed the strategy to programmatically align Xoriant cloud solutions and services to Microsoft priorities to gain momentum on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to take Azure Consumption Revenue for existing and net new customers from $50K to $2mm plus in less than 2 years. That activated enormous benefits for Xoriant to closely work with Microsoft to get high visibility and huge deal flow under Cosell motion. And created $27 mm pipeline for Azure, lot, Cloud/Infra/Security and Data/ML/Al services.
How have you led by example? What have you done to inspire team members around cloud services?
Creating the V-Team at Xoriant to collaborate on different functions to fulfill Microsoft requirements
Constant efforts, communication, co-marketing, co-branding, co-selling with Xoriant + Microsoft processes setup from end to end
Providing the cultural aspects of Microsoft Partner Eco system to Xoriant colleagues and constant trainings to practice and sales teams
Created 1-2 wins quickly to motivate the team and it became easy to onboard more colleagues in different stages to expedite
Creating a truly programmatic approach that can be scaled to help grow the bottom line for Xoriant
How have you mentored other women in the channel – above, below and at your level?
Raj has used her own experiences in entrepreneurship and drawn on the fact that she came to the United States after her Bachelor of Computer Engineering from renowned college from India and came with a $100 in her pocket with dreams to work with Microsoft and have her business. She worked with Microsoft for 10 years on engineering disciplines first and then with Microsoft partner eco system as a first woman architect evangelist. After that she went on to build Arth Systems into a profitable multimillion dollars company in revenue which was then acquired by Xoriant.
Specific examples of Raj’s mentorship include:
Raj mentored other Women at Xoriant for Amazon alliance work, cloud solution work, program management work.
Raj was an industry mentor at Home – Ada Developers Academy to help more than 10 individual Ada Students to understand Cloud market, sales, channel and how to self-brand and launch
Raj has been active in the WBENC network to help other Women Entrepreneurs
Congrats, Raj!!