Arun Thomas

Arun is originally from Chennai (he still calls it Madras) in Southern India and graduated in 1986 from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur.

He then completed his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where he defended his thesis on Monte Carlo and Molecular Dynamics simulations of molecules. Subsequently, he continued his research as a post-doctoral fellow in the area of Fourier-Transform IR Spectroscopy and also taught mathematical and numerical method in engineering at Johns Hopkins while consulting with faculty to increase the use of computers in both theoretical and experimental research. He completed his MBA during this time.

After getting married, Arun and his wife moved to Chicago. Arun worked for a computational fluid dynamics software company and over the course of 4 years transitioned from a numerical scientist to a computer and network infrastructure manager and software project manager.

Arun then moved to the Seattle area and worked for AT&T Wireless followed by stints in software engineering leadership at WatchMark (now part of IBM), Who’s Calling (now part of Reynolds and Reynolds), Envision Telephony and most recently at MAQ Software. His primary technology focus has been telephony, web applications, and the aggregation and reporting of data.

At WatchMark, Arun helped lead a cross-functional team that expanded the OEM portfolio from one telephony vendor to three. Also at WatchMark, he set up and expanded an engineering team to about 80 members spread across the U.S., UK, Sweden, Belgium, India and Malaysia.

At Envision, he spearheaded the effort to modernize the user interface of Click2Coach and migrated it to the cloud while still allowing it to be implemented as an on-premise—or hybrid system. He led the effort to establish a patent at Envision for data collection and activity recording on call center workstations. At MAQ Software, his focus was to expand the business with non-Microsoft customers and to establish a cloud practice and center of excellence while helping lead the PMO.

As an engineering leader, Arun has implemented agile processes; refurbished and renewed product portfolios with re-architected and new products and features; spearheaded the adoption of design patterns, big data technology, full-text and faceted indexing and search, mobile applications, and cloud—as well as Linux and other cost-effective—technologies.

Arun is active in the community volunteering at his children’s schools and with charities in the U.S. and Central America and in India. In 2011 he was elected volunteer of the year at Agros.