Swami Ramani

Technology leader with 20+ years of experience building SaaS products, engineering organizations and cloud platforms in hospitality technology. Currently VP of Information Security, Compliance and SaaS Engineering at IDS Next (400-person group), where the platform serves 220+ hotel chains, 25,000+ POS outlets and 300,000+ rooms.

Previously Chief Technology

Officer of ShawMan Software, where I led the company through its merger with IDS Next. Owns architecture, cloud and security direction across ~200 engineers, and trusted advisor to CEO level functions in technology investment, architecture, AI adoption and enterprise risk. NEXT100 2025 — India's AI-Ready CIOs of Tomorrow.

VP — Information Security, Compliance and SaaS Engineering at IDS Next (2022-04 – Present)

400-person hospitality SaaS group serving 220+ hotel chains, 25,000+ POS outlets and 300,000+ rooms. Owns the integration platform with 80+ integrations and sets the architecture, cloud and security direction across ~200 engineers, directly leading a 50–60-person organisation.

• Leads SaaS engineering for a hospitality platform serving 220+ hotel chains, 25,000+ POS outlets and 300,000+ rooms; owns the integration platform with 80+ integrations; and sets the architecture, cloud and security direction across ~200 engineers, directly leading a 50–60-person organisation.
• Introduced AI-assisted development across the engineering organisation, reducing the typical delivery time for migration and re-architecture engagements by 30–40%.
• Conducted independent technical due diligence on an AI acquisition target at the CEO's request and recommended against the deal; the capabilities the target claimed as proprietary were subsequently built in-house, validating the assessment and avoiding the acquisition cost.
• Reduced annual cloud spend by 41% across 2,000+ resources in 15 Azure subscriptions through re-architecting the product portfolio and revising the service tiers, deployment models and automation.
• Defined the landing zone and target architecture for a two-provider topology in which the production environment is active on AWS with Azure being passive for switchover and led the three-year migration, 20% complete, modelled to deliver 38% savings through Graviton instances and a migration from MS-SQL to PostgreSQL.
• Own information security and compliance company-wide with ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type I and Type II and PCI DSS, met contracted RTO and RPO and had zero breaches; led the company's response to an independent Big Four audit and remediated all findings within two weeks.
• Maintained 99.9% availability while meeting contracted recovery objectives and designed a serverless service to reconcile gateway request and response counters with application order counters to reduce the mean time to detection from 90 seconds to 30 seconds.

Chief Technology Officer at ShawMan Software Pvt. Ltd. (2019-08 – 2022-03)

• Led a 60-person development, QA and support organisation as second-in-command to the Managing Director with responsibility for operational and organisational decisions.
• Set the technical budget with the managing director in terms of staff, cloud and hosting costs, licenses, tools, compliance and audits, and advocated for the trade-offs which made it possible to fund compliance certification and cloud rewrites.
• Delivered to the managing director quarterly technology reviews which included roadmap and headcount prioritization, risk assessment, process compliance, cloud costs, and the transformation from the waterfall to agile methodology.
• Analysed both companies' architecture during the merger assessment and advised the CEO and managing director regarding technology merger options; 25 of the 45 ShawMan products were carried over to the merged company.
• Halved annual hosting costs by migrating to a managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS), deconstructing the monolithic application into four services and rebalancing the application stack.
• Rewrote the cloud and on-premises synchronization logic to Azure Service Bus because of the saturation of the database by more than a hundred unqueued client requests per property; it throttled traffic, imposed a five-hour master and three-hour transaction service-level agreement (SLA), and recovered the product's margin.

Technology Owner / AGM Technology at BookMyShow (2016-08 – 2019-07)

India's largest entertainment ticketing platform.

• Raised payment success rate from 65% to 73% across 10+ payment methods by switching from static to dynamic routing based on card type + issuing bank and direct connections to banks rather than aggregators.
• Launched UPI on both collect and intent flows on Android and collect-only on iOS, acquiring new users equivalent to 15% of the overall user base within 3 months and establishing UPI as a new payment method that replaced wallets.
• Led a team of 30 engineers across backend, frontend and mobile and scaled the service to handle ~86,000 requests per minute on peak during on-sale

Product Manager / Team Leader / Software Engineer at ShawMan Software Pvt. Ltd. (2006-06 – 2016-08)

• Built ShawMan's enterprise POS product from the ground up, the company's flagship and main revenue source, which saw adoption by over 500 clients and 1,000+ installations.
• Led the rewrite of the product across two technology generations including POS Gold (desktop application written in WPF) and POS Ultra (web application with hybrid cloud/on-premise sync)
• Built and led DishCo – a food discovery application with Android/iOS frontends and.NET backend as a product manager and technical lead (backend API development). The application has been downloaded over 100K+ times with 20+ white-labelled versions deployed for clubs and their members.

MBA in Information Technology – K. J. Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research (2014 – 2017)

BCA (part-time) – Tilak Maharashtra University (2005 – 2008)