Dinesh Nirmal is a C-level executive and industry thought leader driving a transformation strategy to build an AI-powered automation business with billions in annual revenue. He brings over 20 years' leadership in data and analytics transformation, leading strategy and execution for technologies spanning machine learning, analytics at the edge, open source, analytics, and database.

Dinesh is Senior Vice President, Products, IBM Software. He leads products for IBM Software, responsible for new products and innovation, the company’s software product and technology direction, location strategy, support, and ecosystem development. Previously Dinesh was General Manager for IBM Automation, Data and AI, and before that, GM, IBM Automation, where he drove new partnerships and acquisitions, including the acquisition of Turbonomic, to transform the organization into an AI-powered automation business. This new business generated significant, double-digit growth within one year. Before that, he held concurrent roles as Chief Product Officer for Cloud Paks, leading IBM’s hybrid cloud platform strategy, and Vice President of Development for IBM Cloud Integration, where he re-defined the strategy to focus on automation.

From 2017-2020, Dinesh was Vice President, Product Development for Data and AI, driving IBM’s platform strategy and creating a new business with a market-defining data and AI platform built on open source. Using agile development processes, the platform 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 rebuilt the business 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 led development for more than 20 products launched during his tenure including IBM Integrated Analytics System, Machine Learning for z/OS, Data Science Experience, IBM Cloud Pak for Data, and IBM Cloud Pak for Data System.

A people-first leader and change agent, Dinesh revitalized organizational culture, uniting global teams by communicating a vivid sense of purpose, resulting in measurably improved morale, and inspired a culture of innovation.

Under his leadership as Site Executive, Silicon Valley Lab has grown to be a hub of innovation, hosting Fireside Chats with local and international dignitaries and an AI summer camp for children in partnership with the City of San Jose. In 2019, Dinesh launched the first dedicated cricket pitch at a tech campus in Silicon Valley.

Dinesh speaks and writes internationally about data and AI technology, delivering a 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.

 
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