As part of our executive series, the ArisGlobal marketing department recently spent time with Ashok Katti, COO & President, APAC. Ashok graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Karnataka University, India then continued his education and received an Executive MBA from the University of Connecticut. 

Ashok has over 25 years of experience in engineering, software development, and life sciences, which has enabled him to help steer ArisGlobal into a new era of record growth for the company. 

What motivates you about ArisGlobal? 

I enjoy working in the life sciences industry. I got attached to it as it helps patients at the end of the day. Ultimately, it is about helping a cause. I am very proud to be working at ArisGlobal, helping the advancement of drug and device development, bringing these therapies to the market faster, and making them safer. 

We also have an amazing group of customers and working with them and helping them has been an absolute pleasure. For example, one of our customers is working on a COVID-19 vaccine, and we’re working very closely with them on this in providing the necessary reporting solution to them. We are honored to be contributing to this area and doing our part. Opportunities like this are what motivate me to work at ArisGlobal. 

With everything going on during these unprecedented times, how is ArisGlobal doing? 

Fortunately, ArisGlobal has not been negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We are lucky to have and support an incredible group of customers, some of which are actively involved in developing vaccine candidates for COVID-19. Our customers still rely on our products as essential technology, and from that perspective, it has been business as usual – full speed ahead. It’s just that the mode of operation has changed as now we’re working from home.  

We recently spoke to Clint Wolfe, ArisGlobal’s Chief HR Officer, and learned about the ArisGlobal COVID-19 Task Force. What initiatives has this task force put into motion for the employees?  

As part of the task force, we started making decisions in terms of issuing travel advisories and other safety and precautionary measures, and we’ve been educating our employees. Thankfully we have a strong infrastructure and I am impressed with how well it has worked. Most people were able to immediately adjust to working from home. And I think, overall, the task force did a great job in meeting regularly and making the right decisions for the employees and their safety. 

Were there additional task force initiatives for customers?  

It was very important for us to ensure that our customers would not be impacted. As you can imagine, we have one of the largest cloud deployments in the industry which we actively manage and maintain. Before our offices went to full work from home status, we made sure that everybody would be able to work and our project executions would be able to continue without any issues. We did everything we could to ensure that even when we worked from home, we would be able to do all the necessary activities without any disruption.

We haven’t had any issues and we have maintained strong communication with our customers. Now everything is running smoothly, and our customers have shown us that they appreciate everything. 

Has productivity been affected?  

What we have witnessed is that, interestingly, the productivity of our employees has increased. Our software releases are coming on time. We have been able to meet all of our development plans. For customer projects, we have been able to meet the timelines that we have set for them in terms of the go-live dates, and we’ve done this without any delays. This is an effective model and opens many opportunities for future operations.  

What accomplishments at ArisGlobal are you most proud of? 

There are many things that I’m proud of at this point. For one, ArisGlobal has the largest multi-tenant platform for safety with over 350 tenants.

We’ve also recently made two milestone releases – LifeSphere MultiVigilance and LifeSphere Regulatory – next-generation cognitive platforms for Safety and Regulatory. 

Last, but not least, during this lockdown and work from home arrangements, we have had 15+ customer “go-lives”. Given the circumstances, I’m very proud of the outcome.