Ojas Patel

At the consultancy I co-foundered, my team and I offer software design, implementation, and product management services for business software needs. We write modern web applications, design enterprise and software architectures, and use human-centered design and other methodologies to turn ideas to working, validated software products. We have shipped dozens of products for Fortune 500 companies, SMBs, and startups. I am heavily involved in the sales as well as software development process.

I co-founded Austin Global Exchange and from the ground-up built a web and mobile based cryptocurrency exchange. In addition to designing and building a front-end geared towards professional traders, I built a scalable, secure backend infrastructure that could support high-volume (hundreds of thousands of transactions per day). I developed novel solutions to scaling and security challenges unique to cryptocurrency space - especially around the growth in the alt-coins and forks. We went from concept to our first trade within two months and had thousands of customers on our platform before exiting via an acquisition of our IP.

I joined Volusion to as a development manager, leading the front-end UI team building the next generation e-commerce platform. We're developing innovative and powerful web frameworks that increase the productivity of our UI developers as well as designing experiences that will delight our customers.

I was brought on to help found the D&B Innovation Lab also known as the SparkLab. In addition to help establishing a physical lab, I developed on my own and worked with vendors to prototype cutting edge proof-of-concepts, user-interfaces, and technologies. I have been an advocate innovation in product development, technologies, processes, and corporate culture. I led the evolution of the lab to a customer solutions lab focused on increasing the ease of adoption of our most technical and powerful product, the D&B Direct API. My accompishments include:

• I developed the D&B Direct Micro App site to showcase the capabilities and convey the possibilities of our product to customers and sales teams. The 20 concepts I built or led the development of have exceeded expectations qualitatively in developer experience and quantitatively in D&B Direct revenue.
• Identifying a need to have improved developer documentation, I developed a nearly-perfect automated documentation generation process which greatly improved docs that customers have said is "wonderful to use". This replaced a cumbersome, expensive, and error-prone manual process and is the direction in which all new technical documentation is being developed.
• Working with our most important customers, I architected and developed practical and innovative solutions around pub-sub, entity resolution, and visualizations.

In addition to Lab, I often visit with our most innovative and key customers, presenting the value of D&B Direct to their technology and business teams side-by-side with D&B sales teams. My peers tell me I have a "very unique ability to combine an incredible development / technical skill set with a mature business acumen & communication skills. I honestly don’t know what to say other than he is CRITICAL to everything related to our D&B Direct and API future."

It's been estimated that my contributions in the Lab along with pre-sales activities can be attributed to over 50% of 2012 sales and allowed our team to meet the aggressive sales target of our new-to-market product.

After spending over a decade in technology, I decided to try something new and joined the Product team to be the product owner for Hoover's Search platform. Working closely with the technology team to understand how the product was assembled, what the key challenges were at the time, and define the vision of the platform moving forward. I was able to quickly made the transition and, with my technical background, immediately add value and solve a number of functional, performance, usability, and design challenges. I  was able to quickly work with the other project managers, sales, and marketing teams to understand and prioritize these issues, ensuring not only that they were addressed but that search functions were improved beyond the current expectations.

In addition to my responsibilities as a product manager, I have been a driving force in building a culture of innovation at Hoovers. I have worked to envision, develop, and present a large number of the concepts within the innovation lab sandbox. My  ideas and concepts were featured within our presentations to key executives within the company and its parent, D&B.

I joined the Hoover's Technology team as a contractor specializing in developing their subscription API and CRM integration applications, the company's two fastest growing products. I developed proof-of-concepts, worked with vendors, designed overall technical architecture and migration strategies. I reduced barriers to API adoption by developing widgets which could be used by customers to easily interact with Hoover's data and workflows. I also participated in customer calls as sales engineer to design solutions for our customers and assist them with API coding and best-practices. In addition to my technical contributions, I've been recognized as an advocate for the customer and agile software development.

I’ve been in the IT organization and worked on various business-critical internal and customer-facing applications. I’ve been involved with the full software life-cycle from engaging with business partners, designing application architectures, coding all tiers from database to business logic to presentation, driving automated test, build, and deploy efforts, and maintenance/support processes.

I initially worked on a product life-cycle and release management application used daily by over 8000 employees for software releases (operating systems, drivers, applications, etc.). During this time, I helped delivered many business enhancements including critical functionality for Vista support, a system to drastically improve the speed of large file transfers (4+ GB operation system images) to regional development centers, and performance enhancements for automated CD/DVD image builds.

For the last 2.5 years, I’ve worked on new applications in the complex solution configuration space. I have been responsible for the UI, but also designed backend infrastructures including a custom .Net CodeDOM-based rules engine, a specialized state-management framework, and dynamic runtime used to model power and cooling requirements for servers in a data center.

I was on a small team who prototyped and developed an advisors framework that allow customers configure a complex solution (servers, storage, switches, etc.) by answering a series of simple questions and answers. The framework, through a WinForms-based studio we also developed, also allows internal solutions teams, who are solutions experts, but non-developers, to author new advisors with no programming knowledge. The framework has proven to be extremely successful and is now the standard for guided product configuration on dell.com.

I played a major role in the delivery of an industry-first web application that allows visitors on dell.com to configure complex solutions (multiple servers, storage devices, etc. configured and validated in the context of a topology such as DAS, SAN, etc.). Previously scoped as a multi-year effort, we went from whiteboard to live site in 6 months. Iterative prototyping, working closely with product owners, and Scrum allowed us to accelerate the schedule dramatically.

I was a development lead on "Data-center Capacity Planner", a modeling tool based on the solution configuration infrastructure we designed, that allows IT professionals plan and tune their compute and infrastructure equipment for maximum efficiency. We developed a sophisticated calculations engine that allows us to give the most accurate power and cooling estimates in the industry.

Beyond normal job responsibilities, I also contributed to a number of initiatives or efforts.

• I drove the “CorpSource” initiative which is the application of the open-source principles and methodology within the corporate environment. The aim of this initiative was to promote reuse, transparency, continual refinement, improved quality by allowing internally-developed applications and libraries to be developed in a public, collaborative manner. I lead the effort to defined the process to onboard existing IT applications into CorpSource, developed portal site, piloted an application and brought common code libraries into CorpSource.
• In my spare time, I developed wizard scripting and evaluation engine, which was eventually included in the production Advisors application and led to 2 patent submissions.
• In my spare time, I designed and prototyped next version of solution-selling user interface. The concept was eventually presented to the Enterprise Leadership Team as part of the IT showcase as the vision of a cohesive solution selling platform. I also incorporated aspects of this platform into production codebase for beta piloting and designed a modular framework which allows the platform to be repurposed for a variety of solutioning capabilities (complex product configuration, data-center capacity planning, virtualization, etc.)
• I developed an automated way to convert posts on a support forum directly to trouble tickets to reduce support burden of development team.
• I mentor other developers web development technologies: Presented online solution configuration overview with team, including Javascript, AJAX, jQuery
• I helped define code review process and security assessment checklists for our IT organization.

Worked with various clients in completely developing custom software solutions including dynamic Internet/Intranet sites, content-management applications, inventory management systems, video-streaming portals, image management systems, and process-automation systems for large and small companies, as well as government organizations.

BS in Electrical Engineering, Minor in Computer Science and Mathematics