Her Story
About Bhavani
Bhavani Bigamudra is a data center infrastructure storage specialist based in Atlanta, Georgia. She began her career as a developer in the telco industry, working with Fujitsu in India, then Nokia and Ericsson in Europe, followed by consulting firms and device launches in the United States. She was involved in AT&T's AO product launch and the acquisition of Cricket Wireless, transitioning around 2014 or 2015 to on-prem data centers and later to cloud infrastructure. In 2020 she joined Microsoft, where her work encompasses compute, networking, and storage, with a current focus on designing and architecting systems to support workloads and AI environments, including preparing SSD-based storage for AI. Bhavani holds a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Madras (1997) and a master's in business administration with a focus on computer science and finance from the same university (1999). She attributes her success to constant learning that provides both technical and business perspectives. Outside her professional role, Bhavani volunteers as an assistant teacher of high school computer science and established a Robotics Club at her children's school, whose team won Robotics World.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Bhavani
01What do you attribute your success to?
I'd say it's learning. Constant learning. The physics and the business degree gave me a view on both the technical aspect as well as the business aspect.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
If you put a black dot in a white bowl, you don't see the white, you only see the black dot in there. So you are only as good as the last mistake you've made, so you constantly work to avoid that mistake. You can erase that mistake, move on, the whiteboard is back there. Clean slate. But not everybody gets that opportunity.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Do not let anybody take your place. When you truly own this, assert your things that you own and things that you can establish and run.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
From a technical standpoint, it's a very emerging area, so you're always on your toes. There's things that you can gather from your yesteryears and apply, but this is a very nascent area. That's a big challenge, as in like you're building a lot of things that also gives you the liberty because you're one of the first few people that are thinking through these challenges. Personally, sometimes as a woman you go and you're probably the only woman in that room.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Being empathetical to others' situation. There are things that are not measurable that I feel like hold a lot more value. Somebody having a professional challenge coming and calling you, or being there for a child, being an ear for them and being empathetical of their situation.
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