The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
I am a software technology practitioner and entrepreneur based in Singapore. I have spent nearly thirty years inventing and commercialising enterprise software technologies — creating production systems from the ground up across banking, telecom, insurance, logistics, and e-government, among others.
In the mid-2000s, I founded Inventys, where we built a product called Fusion — an enterprise application integration tool that connected heterogeneous software systems through their user interfaces, without requiring any modification to the underlying applications. The technology was adopted by nearly every major global BPO operating in India for back-office process automation across their enterprise clients. Inventys was acquired in 2012.
The approach we pioneered was later rebranded by the market as Robotic Process Automation. I have a particular perspective on how that renaming redirected the technology from its original purpose — enterprise integration — toward a narrower focus on human-action automation. Much of what I write here traces the consequences of that redirection and makes the case for returning to the original problem.
I am the principal inventor of multiple patents, including one of the earliest patents in what is now called RPA. Before founding Inventys, I worked at BEA Systems (where I received the President’s Award) and at Motorola, where I was involved in early mobile commerce platforms. My technical background spans systems architecture, software design, programming, and DevOps, alongside executive roles in sales operations, strategy, product marketing, and organisation development.
In 2017, I founded Telligro to build AI-driven intelligent transaction networks for enterprise process integration — technology aimed at achieving straight-through processing between organisations by addressing the interoperability problem directly, rather than automating the workarounds that arise from it.
I write about enterprise integration, process automation, and where AI fits in. The articles on this site draw on three decades of building, selling, and deploying integration technology inside large enterprises. They are my analysis of why the industry spends hundreds of billions of dollars on human workarounds between software systems — and what the alternative looks like.