Anand Sharma
Summary
Software architect who still believes the Unix terminal is the most elegant interface ever invented. I started in graduate school with an SGI workstation running IRIX; more than two decades later, I bring that same instinct to my work at Cisco, where I build enterprise DevOps and developer-platform systems used by 30,000+ engineers. My focus is making complex software delivery feel simple - from CI/CD, release orchestration, and cloud-native architecture to AI-assisted tools and multi-agent systems. I care deeply about the details, but I also understand the importance of zooming out - distilling the essence of the problem, its context, and its possibilities so others can see what matters.
I like to build things, evangelize the ideas behind them, and inspire the people around me to make things that matter.
Key Achievements
- Invited to present at the prestigious Cisco Live 2017 and Cisco Live 2016 events on advancements in DevOps and Enterprise Class Continuous Delivery.
- Led Cisco IT's first Software Developer Experience as a Thought Leader, Evangelist, and Solutions Architect.
- Innovated development of Cisco's first centrally managed Continuous Delivery Platform.
- Architected the first customer-facing Enterprise App Store for Cisco's Cius product.
- Created the first Social Computing Platform for Cisco.
- Oversaw development of the first Cisco API Management Platform, featuring a customer-facing API Console.
Experience
Cisco Systems
Senior Staff Software Engineer
- Lead efforts to standardize an enterprise-scale PPM tool for Operations and Engineering, including conducting a thorough analysis of Aha!, Atlassian Jira Align, and ServiceNow.
- Drive widespread adoption of Jira Align across multiple teams following a presentation to the COO on key findings.
- Investigate solutions to modernize the stack, reduce technical debt, and offer a frictionless experience for the 25K+ Cisco employees across Engineering, Customer Support, and Operations, replacing a homegrown tool for defect lifecycle management.
Staff Software Engineer
- Spearhead the definition, design, documentation, and delivery of cutting-edge software delivery (Enterprise DevOps) tools and experiences to a team of over 30K software engineers.
- Shape enterprise-wide decision-making by presenting frequent, impactful strategic and operational updates related to services and service offerings to Senior IT Leadership.
- Provide insightful thought leadership and technical solutions while evangelizing solutions to Cisco IT customers.
- Reduced costs by launching the Cisco FCS Software Distribution solution using Dev Hub Download to support shipping FCS binaries as container images instead of paying Cloud Providers to host FCS container images.
Senior DevOps Architect
- Introduced first-of-its-kind Code Analytics tool to measure software delivery performance (quality, security, and release metrics) for over approximately 17K unique software, enabling 1K+ engineers to track progress on DevSecOps metrics.
- Increased adoption of Cisco IT CI/CD practices for software delivery to 90% across the organization.
- Boosted the percentage of IT applications deployed into production with unit tests from 7% to 66% and improved unit test coverage for applications by 600%.
- Led event-driven microservices architecture build using a Java SpringBoot, Kafka, Redis, and Angular UX stack.
DevOps Architect
- Drove delivery of approximately 50K software promotions to higher lifecycle environments by creating Code Release as a single software release orchestrator to deliver software using any deployment tool anywhere.
- Grew total raw Production Deployments number by 90% and increased median daily Production Deployments by approximately 300% to approximately 100 per day.
- Reduced software promotion times to approximately 10 minutes, which improved Deployment Frequency DORA metrics for Cisco IT.
- Led event-driven microservices architecture build using a Java SpringBoot, Kafka, Redis, Argo Workflow, and React-based UX stack.
DevOps Architect
- Led Cisco IT's first-ever Software Developer Experience Portal as a Thought Leader, Evangelist, and Solutions Architect. The Software Developer Experience removes friction and contextual work for the developer, allowing them to continue to focus on building software.
- Improved the Lead Time for Changes DORA metric by reducing self-service requests to approximately 5 minutes, resulting in the self-service of approximately 22K CRUD requests across 4K+ unique Software Engineers using Code Console in 2018.
- Oversaw event-driven Microservices architecture built using Java SpringBoot, MongoDB, Redis, and React-based UX stack.
DevOps Architect
- Launched Cisco IT's first Continuous Delivery Platform with a mix of open-source and commercial tools, resulting in approximately 90% adoption of CI/CD tools and mature software engineering practices to deliver software.
- Partnered with Cisco IT Delivery Organizations to successfully deliver an enterprise-wide Continuous Delivery solution that scaled across approximately 100 IT Services and approximately 2,000 IT Applications.
- Enhanced deployment of IT Apps into production with Unit Tests from less than 10% to 60%+ by building a homegrown solution to handle continuous delivery of Oracle software, addressing a gap in Oracle's existing offerings. This solution is currently used by 90% of Cisco teams for 100+ deployments a day.
- Delivered a series of core DevOps tools including GitHub SaaS, GitHub Enterprise, CloudBees Jenkins, Artifactory, SonarQube, Spinnaker, and CloudBees CDRO.
Information Technology System Architect
No detailed description was surfaced in the current LinkedIn profile.
Information Technology Technical Lead
No detailed description was surfaced in the current LinkedIn profile.
Information Technology Engineer
- Architected and designed web-based applications for the Advanced Services business unit.
- Developed web-based application services on the J2EE platform, primarily using open-source MVC frameworks such as Struts and WebWork.
- Continued to act in the capacity of System Administrator of the Professional Services Automation application. Member of the core team responsible for both the US and Global launch of this application.
- Provided 24x7 systems and application administrative support to all AS-IT applications, including ASA (Advanced Services Automation) and ASAP (Advanced Services Account Portal).
Information Technology Analyst
- Responsible for understanding business needs and assisted in authoring business requirements documents (BRDs).
- Worked with the Technical Lead in authoring Systems Requirement Documents (SRDs).
- Assisted in the formulation of testing and quality assurance scripts and plans for applications.
Avaya
Web Architect
The New Technology/Architecture group architected the various components of the e-business infrastructure. It was also responsible for researching new technologies with the aim of building world-class e-business services for customers.
- Researched ways to make Avaya's e-business applications WAP-enabled and researched new publishing frameworks based on Java and XSLT technologies.
Lucent Technologies
IT Software Engineer
- Played a lead role in designing and developing Lucent's first Single Sign-on solution for external web applications, leveraging the Netegrity SiteMinder solution.
Web Technical Leader
Customer Self Support (support.lucent.com) was an extremely busy site. As the lead developer of the first SSO pilot, took on the added responsibility of leading the effort to migrate the entire application into an NES presentation layer, NAS (Netscape Application Server) business-logic layer, and Oracle 7.3.x data layer framework.
- Led a team of three developers and rewrote all server-side programs into Java applogics.
- Administered the development NES/NAS/Oracle environment for the CSS project.
Arizona State University
IS Lab Lead
The IS Lab catered to the technology needs of Arizona State instructors and students. It focused on helping the community embrace new and upcoming technologies in education.
- Worked on projects involving web applications, proofs of concept for new technologies and products, and helping IS Lab customers get introduced to them.
Education
Master of Computer Science, Software Engineering
Master of Science, Industrial Engineering
Awards and Presentations
2018 Gold Stevie Winner
Enterprise Software Release Digitization, Secure DevOps
Cisco Live 2016
Panel discussion: "Addressing the What's, Why's and How's in the New World of DevOps"
Cisco Live 2017
Presentation: "Enterprise Class Continuous Delivery"
Cloud Identity Summit 2012 - Vail, CO
Presentation: Who Says Elephant Can't Dance? Securely Externalizing APIs @ Cisco hosted by Ping Identity