Arun Pillai

About

Interested in what actually works — not what looks good on a slide.

I've spent 22+ years in enterprise software, moving from engineering into roles as a portfolio owner, architect, and product owner for large-scale services businesses. I've launched brand-new portfolios from a ground up — both subscription-based services and business transformation services — and taken them from concept to global scale.

My expertise and passion is in the full arc: designing a service, building the operating model behind it, and getting it to market in a way that holds up at scale. That arc — design, build, scale — is the thread that runs through everything I've worked on.

These days I think mostly about how enterprises actually absorb new technology — cloud platforms, agentic AI, the operating models underneath them — and why the adoption rate rarely matches the announcement rate. The writing here covers product, portfolio strategy, customer success, frontier models, hyperscalers, and the behavioral patterns that decide whether a service gets adopted or shelved.

When something interests me, I build it. The working theses below are how I stay honest — it's easy to have opinions about things you've only read about.

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