Sathya Ram Gopalan
Chief Technical Architect, Transact
“After 24 years with Temenos, I still see myself as a developer. Staying close to the product and the code has helped me be who I am in this company.”
Sathya joined Temenos in 1998, a time when there were just 29 employees in his homeland of India. Having started in product maintenance, he soon found himself working with a handful of others to lead a product development center in the country. The team initially worked under supervision from the UK before going on to carry out its own work.
“That gave us a lot of confidence and we started growing the team,” he says. “We had 20 people joining every month and we kept on training them as they arrived. It was a very fun time, it felt like a kind of family. We were conscious that we were not only doing product development, but were also building Temenos India.”
Such is the change over the years that today India is home to hundreds of Temenos developers, based with Sathya in Chennai, as well as in Bangalore and Hyderabad, with other product developers spread around the world.
There have also been big changes in the technology over the years, from an initial focus on DevOps to Cloud and scalability today.
“It’s been a non-stop learning process,” Sathya says, “as soon as we learn something, we have to unlearn it. Temenos provides the opportunity for you to develop and we have a culture of evolving from our mistakes.”
Sathya has played an integral part in product development from the outset, always choosing to work on the code. While he is happy to be made a Founding Fellow, he prefers to see it not as an individual award but as recognition of the company’s philosophy of phased software development, continuously upgrading the product.
“My role is to merge any new technologies, including through acquisitions, to evolve the product, because we seek to improve it year on year.
“I carry the experience of this company’s core philosophy and core product, so I’m able to map what we want to do with the new technology as it appears.
“I have spent more than half my life with Temenos, and I still see myself as a developer. Staying close to the product and the code has helped me be who I am in this company.”
Sathya says he has found plenty of satisfaction in his career. He’s been part of every major product transformation Temenos has undertaken in the past 24 years. He has also travelled widely, spending time with clients as well as in the UK which he says at times felt like a second home. There are two things that he particularly relishes about the way Temenos operates.
First is the pride he feels in working alongside very intelligent people in an area where it is vital to keep up with new methodologies all the time.
Second is the empowering spirit. “At Temenos you can feel as if you own the company,” he says. “There is an entrepreneurial spirit that makes you feel like much more than just an employee.”
“At Temenos you can feel as if you own the company,” he says. “There is an entrepreneurial spirit that makes you feel like much more than just an employee.”