Balaji Prasad is President of the strategic architecture firm, Eminnode LLC. Previously, Mr. Prasad served as an EA leader within Cognizant’s Global Banking and Financial Services Practice and as CTO and Chief Architect for various large enterprises, including EDS (now HP Enterprise Services), General Motors, OnStar, and The Hartford Financial Services. With 30 years’ experience in IT leadership centered around architecture, innovation, and business technology alignment, Mr. Prasad has led multimillion-dollar EA & IT strategy programs, devised complex technical solutions in fast-changing and rapid-growth businesses, facilitated CEO-level innovation dialogues, and led globally dispersed teams in a matrixed onsite/offshore model.

With both US and global experience, Mr. Prasad’s competencies span across the IT spectrum and its strategic positioning in several industries. He has worked in various roles and functions, ranging from software developer, security architect, data manager, business capability planner, business analyst, innovation coach, IT strategist, technical architect, chief architect, program director, workshop facilitator, practice leader, and CTO. These experiences help him communicate and collaborate effectively with people at various levels within an organization to transform ideas into real-world changes that move businesses forward.

Mr. Prasad is a published author, holds patents in process, and has been a frequent speaker/moderator at major industry conferences on many topics, including SOA, the Semantic Web, nanotechnology, wireless/mobile, and speech recognition. He has also served on the advisory committee of W3C, helping drive WWW standards. Mr. Prasad is a TOGAF9-certified architecture practitioner and a former architect trainer at the International Association of Software Architects (IASA). He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and a master's degree in business from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Mr. Prasad also held a graduate fellowship at the University of Maryland, College Park. Besides his business technology strategy and architecture interests, he coaches and trains IT professionals to be effective in their roles in corporations. He can be reached at experts@cutter.com.