DISH Appoints Kannan Alagappan Chief Technology Officer

The following press release was posted at DISH’s site. We at Solid Signal wish Mr. Algappan the best of luck!

July 19, 2019
ENGLEWOOD, Colo., July 19, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — DISH today announced that it has appointed Kannan Alagappan Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer reporting to DISH President and CEO Erik Carlson. Alagappan has held technology leadership roles with major telecom and cloud services providers, including Reliance Jio, Telstra and Rackspace.

“Kannan is an incredible strategist, technologist and an inspiring leader,” said Carlson. “As DISH continues to deliver the best technology experience for our customers, and as we pursue our entry into the wireless industry, I’m confident Kannan’s vision and leadership will prove transformative for our organization.”

As CTO, Alagappan will lead DISH Technologies, the DISH group that plays an integral role in defining the company’s technology strategy, oversees its software and hardware engineering initiatives, and manages the organization’s broadcast and satellite operations.

“As an organization that is entrepreneurial to its core and is committed to delivering innovation and value to its customers, I can’t think of a more exciting environment than DISH,” said Alagappan.

About Kannan Algappan

Here’s the info from his official biography if you were curious.

In his role as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Kannan Alagappan leads DISH Technologies, the DISH group that plays an integral role in defining the company’s technology strategy, oversees its software and hardware engineering initiatives, and manages the organization’s broadcast and satellite operations. Before joining DISH, Alagappan has held various technology leadership roles. He served as CTO and Head of Technology for Australian telecommunications leader Telstra. While there, he oversaw the creation of high-performing software engineering centers across the globe and changed Telstra’s approach to product development and software engineering. Prior to Telstra, Alagappan served as Senior Vice President of Data Center, Cloud and Product Engineering at Reliance Jio, a group company of Reliance Industries Limited. At Jio, Alagappan was responsible for creating cloud data centers across India, setting up cloud operations to manage over 100 million customers. Alagappan also served as Vice President, Strategy and Transformation Services of cloud-computing leader Rackspace Hosting, where he managed a world-class team of engineers that helped several enterprises adopt and migrate to the cloud, and also adopt Agile, DevOps and SRE software engineering practices. Throughout his career, Alagappan has worked as a technology consultant for various Fortune 500 companies, including Comcast, T-Mobile and DISH. He has primarily helped companies implement digital transformations and build technology platforms at scale. Alagappan holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Arkansas and a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Annamalai University in Tamil Nadu, India.

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.