You’ve seen them quite often around the Pathfinder-verse, heard them speak at events or virtual meetings, maybe even dialogued with them in a forum thread—they’re our Most Valuable Pathfinders! They are the spark keeping the Pathfinder Community ablaze, so it was about time we took a beat to really get to know each one of our MVPs better and share their unique stories with you!

So without further ado, let’s get to know...
 

Phani Kumar Ediga

The Basics

• Years of Automation Experience: 6 years
• Current Company: Columbia
• Official Title: Business Applications Manager

But this is how Phani would actually describe what he does: I tell people that I listen to business problems from stakeholders and analyze the feasibility of solving the problem with technology. My team and I consider the expectations, trade-offs, and best practices of automating a solution before handing off an architecture to a developer to develop.

• Biggest Professional Achievement to date: The opportunity to join Columbia, help expand their automation program, build a team, set up an infrastructure for a CoE, and penetrate the entire organization with automation, adding value throughout, is definitely his proudest professional accomplishment. (All of that was accomplished within only a few years to boot!)

Five Fun Facts

• His birthday is June 13 - same as our MVP Vishal!
• If he could have any super power, he’d want an Iron Man suit and all the power that entails!
• His favorite TV show is Game of Thrones
• One of the most adrenaline-inducing activities he’s done is white water rafting
• The next place he’d most like to visit is the Himalayan Mountains

Expertise / Specializations

Phani is a technical expert with over 10 years of development experience. Thinking about where he’d like to continue to grow professionally, he says he wants to gain more experience in leadership, specifically on the engineering side of the business. He wants to think beyond automation and learn how to connect various other technologies to automation in order to extract the most value for the business. Phani would also love to work more with the LLM integrations and template frameworks in the Automation Anywhere platform.

If he had one piece of advice for someone new to automation it would be:

“Developer forums are extremely helpful places to learn, improve your skills, and stay connected with industry professionals.”

Phani in the Community

Phani has developed many personal relationships with like-minded development professionals over the years and enjoys staying in touch with those people to share ideas, discuss the newest tech innovations, and exchange thoughts on how to solve complex problems. He also mentors new people on his team at Columbia, with a particular goal of empowering them to accomplish tasks independently.
 

What’s Next for Phani

Currently, Phani is dedicated to continuing to gain expertise in the technology systems across the Columbia ecosystem. He is also leveraging his architecture skills to train his team to configure solutions rather than customize them by relying on out-of-the-box frameworks as much as possible for standardization and maximum efficiency.


Thank you, Phani, for letting us all get to know you better. And thank you for your continued contributions to our Pathfinder Community!