How Freshworks’ CIO Helped Prepare The Salesforce Rival For Its $10

CEOs, CFOs and chief legal officers typically lead the way when it comes to getting businesses ready for public offerings. But tech leaders play an important role too, as Prasad Ramakrishnan’s experience shows. Ramakrishnan is the CIO of Freshworks, an enterprise tech company whose cloud-based software helps businesses manage things such as customer support, IT help desks and sales and marketing operations. Since opening its doors in Chennai, India in 2010, Freshworks, which has appeared multiple times on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, has grown into an international software powerhouse and went public on the Nasdaq in September in a transaction that valued it at just over $10.1 billion and raised more than $1 billion to fund its expansion. For 55-year-old Ramakrishnan, who previously held top tech jobs at companies such as storage networking firm Brocade (now owned by Broadcom), edtech business HotChalk and Veeva Systems, which provides cloud services for life sciences businesses, getting ready to take Freshworks public meant that he and his staff of 165 people had work to do on multiple fronts. One of them was helping the company’s finance team by upgrading its technology so that it could finalize Freshworks’ accounts even faster. “As part of any IPO process, you want to set up your financials to make sure that the close process is as optimized as possible,” says Ramakrishnan, who also accelerated work to ensure key metrics were clear across the company. As Freshworks grew, its internal teams had developed a smorgasbord of dashboards to gauge progress in their respective areas. While each tracker served its purpose, the proliferation of scorecards meant it was hard for the company’s leaders to get what Ramakrishnan calls “a single source of truth” about the overall state of the business. Even before Freshworks decided to go public, its tech team was charged with helping to tackle this dashboard jungle—a process that accelerated after the business set its sights on the Nasdaq listing. Altogether, more than 1,200 dashboards have been scrapped and the tech team has improved the way data is displayed on the relatively small number that remain. “The Street…expects a greater degree of control and governance,” says Ramakrishnan. “We were already on that path.”Another thing he cut back was his own range of responsibilities. In addition to being CIO, Ramakrishnan was also the company’s chief information security officer (CISO), overseeing its cybersecurity strategy. Freshworks decided that as a public company it would make sense from a corporate governance perspective to separate the two roles and appointed a chief risk officer not long before the IPO to be a peer to its CIO and to assume his CISO tasks. Ramakrishnan says he supported the creation of the new position, which is occupied by his former vice-president of cybersecurity.

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