Deltek has appointed Dinakar Hituvalli as its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Senior Vice President. Hituvalli joins after spending over 20 years at Oracle, where he became Group Vice President of Product development for the Oracle Cloud ERP applications. He also spent 6 years as Vice President of Product Development, leading the global development team for the PPM applications within the ERP suite. At Deltek, he will oversee the global engineering and cloud teams. This numbers around 1,000 employees, many working remotely across the US, EMEA and Asia.
Enterprise Times asked Hituvalli what attracted him to Deltek. Hituvalli replied, “Deltek’s reputation as an industry leader in its space, and history of success and driving innovation to generate value for their customers really appealed to me. Also, Deltek’s corporate culture that values collaboration, diversity, inclusion and employee development makes it a great company to work for.”
Is Hituvalli prompting investment in R&D at Deltek??
Hituvalli will report directly to Mike Corkery, Deltek’s President and CEO. Corkery commented, “I am thrilled to announce that Dinakar Hituvalli has joined the Deltek Executive team to lead our global technology organization. Dinakar is a proven technology leader with years of experience managing large engineering teams and leading the shift in products from on-premise to the cloud. I am confident that his deep expertise with ERP software, his collaborative nature, and passion for delivering best-in-class technology will help us take Deltek solutions to the next level.”
With a mission to “deliver solutions that help our customers connect and automate the project lifecycle that fuels their business.” Hituvalli certainly seems to have the credentials to lead the Technology teams at Deltek. His experience at Oracle seems like the ideal background to lead the Deltek technology strategy. He will have the remit to drive growth and innovation across the Deltek portfolio.
With the remit to drive growth, will Deltek increase investment in R&D? Hituvallli replied, “While I have only been with Deltek for a short time, I can tell you Deltek sets aside significant resources on R&D. A big part of our R&D strategy is about making sure we bring the right capabilities to help our customers. So it’s less about how much we are spending and more about continuing to ensure we are listening to our customers and innovating our offerings to bring them more value.”
What does it mean for Deltek products?
Hituvalli will take the lead and be responsible for delivering against the product roadmap, and collaborating with Deltek’s product strategy team on the roadmap direction, vision, and industry focus of Deltek’s Cloud ERP applications. At Oracle, he built the next generation of enterprise applications by incorporating natural language processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning into all aspects of the applications. Can he offer the same, but improved approach at Deltek?
An engineer by background, Hituvalli graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science with an BS in engineering and has a Masters in engineering from the University of Toledo, Ohio. He commented, “I’m very excited to join Deltek to help drive the technology strategy forward and enhance our innovative product roadmap. As companies look for ways to stay competitive in today’s market, it is critical they have the right technology partners to help them evolve their business. I look forward to fostering a strong engineering culture and working with our talented team to help Deltek continue to innovate at a rapid pace, and in turn, deliver exceptional service to our customers.”
ET asked Hituvalli why the excitement level, and he added, “Deltek’s strong track record of innovation and thought leadership in the project-based ERP space resonated with me, given my extensive background and experience in a similar domain. I am excited at the prospect of making a meaningful and positive impact by driving growth for Deltek and enabling the digital transformation of its customers.”
Seeing what changes he brings to the Deltek engineering teams, as an agile evangelist, passionate about innovative SDLC methodologies, will be interesting.
What will AI mean for Deltek products
ET asked Deltek about the changes AI, specifically Generative AI, would bring to project-based ERP over the next few years. The response was both informative and covered three areas. Below is an expansion of what Deltek provided ET and our analysis of what Deltek might create for customers.
AI will empower project managers by providing a virtual project assistant that can help generate status updates. This would infer that the AI could extract relevant information from project data and turn it into an email or report containing a project’s key elements, such as progress, risk and project finances. The project manager could review and send on, saving valuable time from the important manual tasks. The result frees the project manager to focus on strategic work that adds value or reduces risk.
It can deliver automation across the project lifecycle, especially in content-heavy processes. For example, this might include generating email pitches for email marketing campaigns or responses within CRMs. Another area is contract management, where AI can help deconstruct complex contract data to pinpoint possible problematic clauses and compliance concerns. It will be interesting to see whether Deltek develops its solution in the CLM space or partners with a vendor to embed contract intelligence.
The third response was, “Proactively assess risk by evaluating vast amounts of supplier data from various online data sources and providers, build a risk profile and then suggest optimal risk mitigation strategies.”
It will also be interesting to see whether there is an investment in GovWin from Deltek.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
In Hituvalli, Deltek has found a leader that is not only hugely experienced in its sector. He also has experience in leading large global engineering teams. Is this a step down for Hituvalli? Certainly not. It enables him to use his vast experience gained at Oracle in a senior leadership position where he can have far greater influence over the company’s direction.
Oracle often builds great leaders, and it will be interesting to see how Hituvalli steps into the CSuite role and how public-facing he becomes. While at Oracle, he did not seem to be public facing. Certainly, ET could find few references in the public domain. That is one aspect that should change in the next few months. The culture change from Oracle to Deltek may be another shock. In summary, this is a great hire that holds huge promise for Deltek, its customers and Hituvalli.
