Chaitra Vedullapalli is busy, chasing a cherished dream of floating a Guinness record event. Women in Cloud, the community-led economic development organization that she co-founded, is vying for a Guinness World Records title for the most users in a vision board virtual hangout.
The move is part of spreading awareness on the core objective of Women in Cloud: generating over $1B worth economic opportunities by 2030.
A Woman of Influence in technology and gender equality, Chaitra serves on multiple boards and participates in global discussions with the UN and tech companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Accenture. She recently established a 100M Global Partnership Network of women with 17 organizations.
Chaitra shared her experience and insights with The Cyber Express in an interview with Chandu Gopalakrishnan. Excerpts:
I personally know many friends and acquaintances who were talented and who had the drive, but who chose to settle and then compromised their lives and careers. You are an exception in many ways. Tell us more about more about your personal journey.
My father was a Major in the Indian Army. Naturally, there was a lot of discipline, and a do or die attitude in our upbringing. I got married around 1995 and moved to the US a year later. There, I saw a show that talked about the announcement of Windows 95 and how it was going to touch a billion people. The word billion remained stuck in my mind.
Like, how can a software with an invisible code matter for a billion people? Ideas continued, so did my training and experience in technology. After spending years on work at places including Oracle and Microsoft, I wanted to create a billion dollars of economic access for women. And if we become successful, then we can also touch a billion people on this planet.
So, what was your first step towards attaining that goal? Did you reach out to peers? Or was it a solitary journey?
My principles are usually focused on collective action and collective axis. I do not like to do things alone. I always feel that you need to have a tribe. When I left Microsoft, I was ready to set up and run an enterprise, but that’s when I realized that those enterprise opportunities were not accessible.
When I saw an opportunity for women to participate in the digital economy, I spoke to my friends who are at Microsoft. We sat down, did the research, and realized this was a huge opportunity I clearly remember the first line of our business idea: it was on a napkin with a cloud, and we said 1 billion and a Woman’s face. It later became our logo.
We did our first event, and I invited 10 of my friends to speak about the opportunity. We expected 30 to 50 people to turn up, but the attendance was about 400! We moved to our first cloud accelerator to help women founders to win enterprise opportunities.
Women in Cloud is a community-led economic development organization with a declared aim of generating $1 billion worth of economic access for women. So, what was the inspiration behind this Guinness record attempt?
We are in an era when major changes are happening at a macro-economic level. And that’s causing a lot of anxiety and unclear for everyone. At the individual level, everyone is feeling it because they can’t see a very clear path. I have been doing vision boards every month for the last 16 years. Once you know what the vision and the goals look like, it becomes easy to navigate.
So, when you look at the current climate and where women are, we felt was it would be a great idea for us to help them build a personal vision and strategy so they can navigate the current world. So, how can we make this process of inclusion fun? How can we make it cool? How can we make a mark with our attempt?
We reached out to Guinness Book of World Record about a possible attempt to create a record participation. The process started in August 2022. Our board of advisors were very excited and gave the approval.
What can Women in Cloud offer to a tech professional with focus and aspirations on cloud technology and business?
When we think about the professional skilling and technical skilling, we understand the need to have certifications. Certification helps you understand how to deploy the technology. We have scholarships available for women and have already distributed over 2,500 Cloud certifications and scholarships for women across 65 countries.
Once you have that basic certification, you need wraparound services: leadership skilling, access to recruiters etc. that helps you figure out the path you need to go. Our community holds roundtables; connect them to advisors; hold resume building interviews; and helps enhance LinkedIn profiles.
And then, we have events like our annual summit that focuses on deep learning and deep workshops, which allows them to progress on the paths they have taken. I believe that’s the reason why our community has grown to 70,000 people in 65 countries.
I am a cybersecurity journalist. How would knowledge or familiarity with cloud technologies benefit me as a person and as a professional?<span data-ccp-props=”{“201341983″:0,”335559739″:160,”335559740″:259}”>
Firstly, If you’re covering security, then you should know the basic security services. It helps you as a journalist, because when people are talking about the innovation, you are in sync with the thought. You can contribute to the discussion and take it to a very different level, because you have deep technical knowledge around it.
When you look at the press releases, you can catch something that a normal journalist cannot, because you know what that service is.
Secondly, when you’re reaching out to the experts, you can have a much deeper conversation with them. If you are aware, you will be in the room with them shaping the narrative, and then you’re talking about it in a way that common men can consume and absorb.
In your view, how is cloud technology transforming the economy?
Cloud enables easy access to higher storage and fast computing. This helps any organization to become productive and efficient, reduce capital maintenance, and cut administrative costs. As we are adopting the technology, it is also transforming the economy in all areas from engineering, marketing, operations, ns, and sales policy. It’s kind of changing the end to end business process, because now the cloud allows you to do that.
Before COVID, cloud technology was usually called a silent game changer, and that is true. However, after COVID, most of the companies know it is the strategic edge to save cost, streamline the business process and increase profits.
Even for Women in Cloud, when we pivoted from in-person events to online ever, everything we did through transformative cloud technology. And it was at a fraction of a cost. And I still started to keep that I have not changed that model.
So, I would say is, every company and every executive now understands cloud much better than before. And they are ready to transform the business more and more.
When we speak of gender parity, most of the time, we get general statements without actual numbers to back them up. If so, how can women increase the stake or improve their presence in the sector? Are women really underrepresented in the cloud industry?
Let me start with the founder ecosystem first. Right now, I would say that female representation there is under 10%. That is one area where Women in Cloud is working on. We want to make sure that women are learning how to build technologies that can be patented.
The second one is the money part of it. How many of our VCs are investing in women tech founders? And are they seeing the solutions? Only about 2% of that investment is going into women-built tech solutions. When you have less money going in, less patterns develop there. Moving on to enterprise contracting, less 33% of those contracts go to women tech founders. Look at it: there’s the lack of solution, lack of contracts, and lack of funding.
Moving on to corporate leadership, the number of women in the C-level role is less than 5%. The presence in middle-level management is also dropping because of the COVID situation and women leaving the workforce.
There is no magic bullet to improve the situation. But I personally feel it can be addressed through national-level policies. Governments must ensure that women are part of the workforce. Our community is doing what we can, but a great change can happen if the state as well as the corporations pitch in.
