About

Guru Bala is a technology leader with a passion for building and growing new businesses. With almost 20 years of experience, Guru has a diverse background that includes development, sales, business development, and technology leadership roles. Guru started his career as a developer in the telecom industry, building next-generation networks at Alcatel-Lucent. He then moved on to sales and business development roles in the software industry, where he helped organizations grow their customer base and market share in the Asia region. At Microsoft, Guru did multiple sales and technology leadership roles, including building and growing the Azure business from scratch. He led a strong team of sales and technology specialists focused on growing advanced services of Azure, such as Modern Apps, Big Data, AI/ML, and IOT. Currently, Guru is the Head of Solutions Architecture for AWS Specialized Services at Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd. He and his team help customers drive innovation and growth through adoption of specialized services like autonomous computing, containers, edge services, managed databases, analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Outside of his corporate life, Guru mentors start-ups and helps early growth stage companies with financial modeling, growth strategy, and align technology adoption/roadmap to drive business outcomes. Guru holds an MBA from XLRI and a BE in Computer Science from Shanmugha Arts, Science, Technology and Research Academy. He also has certificates from Stanford University Graduate School of Business (Executive Education) and mitx (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Making Data-Driven Decisions Using Data Science and Big Data Analytics. Guru's tech stack includes AWS, ML, AI, Azure, and Big Data. With his relevant experience of almost 20 years, Guru is a technology leader who is passionate about building and growing new businesses.