Kannan is currently the Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Telstra, Melbourne, Australia, a telecommunications company with revenue of AUD 28 billion. At Telstra, Kannan’s accountabilities include creation of high-performing software engineering centers across the globe and changing the way Telstra approaches product development and software engineering. His goal is to improve productivity by 30 percent by setting up more than 110 high-performing teams by the end of 2018 and reduce operating expenses by AUD 54 million by changing the way Telstra does software development. Prior to his Software Engineering role, Kannan was CTO, instrumental in setting up the 2020 Vision and Technology strategy.

Prior to Telstra, Kannan was the Senior Vice President of Data Center, Cloud and Product Engineering at Reliance Jio, a group company of Reliance Industries Limited with revenue of USD 75 billion. At Jio, Kannan was responsible for creating a unique experience for customers by enabling an infrastructure and software delivery platform that provides 99.99 percent availability. Kannan was responsible for effective management and utilization of USD 500 million for the creation of 16 delivery center facilities pan-India, and an additional USD 250 million for infrastructure and platforms, strategy, engineering and implementation of 16 data centers each with a capacity of 15MW internal hybrid platform hosting strategy to enable the launch and growth of 200 million customers in the next two years, including complete automation of data center and application deployments and day-to-day operations and support of the hybrid platform. Jio has launched its service and is serving over 65 million subscribers in India.

At Reliance Jio, Kannan was the Vice President, Strategy and Transformation Services of a USD 1.8 billion cloud-computing leader Rackspace Hosting, managing a world-class pre-sales and proserv team that consisted of cloud, enterprise, and migration architects across geographies.

He is an established leader and business partner who partners well with other executives to use technology to transform and simplify business processes while delivering bottom line measurable benefit. Prior to Reliance Jio, he was a consultant for various Fortune 500 companies – Comcast, T-Mobile, and Dish Network. Kannan has experience in implementation of information technology (IT) architecture and roadmaps and has the ability to align overall IT strategy with the business and partner with customers to define long-term solutions.