General Manager
IBM Automation
Dinesh Nirmal is a C-level executive and thought-leader steering a transformation strategy to build an AI- powered automation business to drive billions in annual revenue. As General Manager he has global responsibility for business strategy, technology development, operations, sales, marketing, and overall financial performance. Dinesh brings over 20 years’ leadership in industry-defining technologies from database to machine learning and edge analytics.
Recognizing a powerful opportunity to unlock enterprise value with automation, Dinesh drove the shift from a set of siloed products into a cloud-native hyperautomation business by building a single AI-infused platform on an API- and event-driven architecture. The platform is factored on three personas: Line of Business, IT, and App Integration and Development.
For Line of Business, understanding that no single technology like RPA can truly automate the enterprise, Dinesh led development of IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation — a unified low-code platform comprised of process mining to discover automation opportunities, RPA, workflow, and event-driven architectures to orchestrate and automate.
To help IT teams proactively detect and remediate application issues before they occur, IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps employs advanced IBM Research change risk management techniques to predict from all sources of data including code changes, ticketing systems, logs, and a variety of other factors. This proactively prevents problematic deployments from going into production.
To give App Integration Developers time to innovate, IBM Cloud Pak for Integration automates tasks by providing a sophisticated set of API management, Kafka, and application connectivity technology to connect people, data, and business systems. It uses a low code suite of multi-style integration tools, and AI is infused throughout to make creation of integration flows, API test automation, and data mapping exceedingly easy.
Together, this platform is powered by a common automation fabric with a common set of tooling. To enrich this fabric and further cement our aggressive posture as the world’s leader in automation, Dinesh led acquisitions and partnerships including Instana, WDG Automation, MyInvenio, Confluent, GitLab, Turbononic, Sysdig, and Humio.
Prior to his role as GM for IBM Automation, Dinesh held concurrent positions as Chief Product Officer for Cloud Paks, leading IBM’s hybrid cloud platform strategy, and Vice President of Development for IBM Cloud Integration.
From 2017 to 2019, Dinesh was Vice President of Development for IBM Data and AI. In this role he created a new business with a market-defining data and AI platform built on open source, which went from incubation to a production enterprise-ready offering in months, generating significant revenue increasing by double and triple digits YOY over three consecutive years and gaining favorable analyst recognition. Dinesh led the transformation to factor AI into every part of the software and hardware portfolio and drove new customer engagements with some of the largest enterprises in the world in telecom, manufacturing, and other industries by inspiring a vision of data modernization and AI-driven strategy and providing a practical blueprint to achieve it.
Dinesh speaks and writes internationally about cloud technology, automation, and AI, Keynote at THINK 2019 with David Bernert, Chief Architect of Boeing Corporation, publishing a guest column in VentureBeat, and cited by Forbes in 5 Artificial Intelligence Business Lessons from the Masters. He serves on the Board of R Consortium to help guide the open source R language and is an advisor for Accel.AI.