About Sesh Tirumala
Sesh Tirumala, Chief Information Officer at Western Digital, has discussed revenue leakage and cybersecurity in recent podcast appearances. In a January 2025 podcast, he defined revenue leakage as an unintentional loss of revenue often caused by operational inefficiencies, system issues, or siloed departments. He stated that companies should connect different departments and processes, and that "all roads lead to data," emphasizing the need to examine data, improve processes, and automate. He cited examples such as discrepancies in usage-based billing and challenges in managing pricing and discounting as common sources of leakage.
In a September 2024 podcast, Tirumala discussed cybersecurity, noting that when he joined Western Digital a year prior, the company experienced a cyber incident. He stated that a key lesson was that security depends on "people, process, and technology" and that "unless you get all three legs of the stool in order, you're never safe." He also described his responsibilities as including IT, security (with the CISO reporting to him), data and analytics, and factory IT systems. He identified risk and compliance, particularly cybersecurity, as his top priority and outlined a focus on operational excellence, employee experience, and exploring business model shifts such as as-a-service offerings.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Sesh Tirumala's recent appearances.
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Transcript (10 segments)
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Host0:14
Welcome to the podcast Revenue Checkpoint. Today we have a special guest, Sesh Tirumala, joining us to discuss how to rescue revenue. Hello Sesh, thanks for joining us. Can you please introduce yourself to our audience?
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Sesh Tirumala0:30
Thank you, Ravin. Pleasure being here. I'm Sesh Tirumala, I'm the Chief Information Officer at Western Digital. I've been there for about 18 months, and prior to that I was a CIO at Procter & Gamble and Anaplan, a software as a service company, and then prior to that a very long career at Cisco Systems.
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Host0:51
All right, Sesh. So you have been in companies that have done a lot of subscription monetization on the SaaS side. That's very interesting. Have you come across leakage revenue issues? Tell us a little about it if you have.
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Sesh Tirumala1:03
Great question. To me, revenue leakage is really an unintentional loss of revenue, right? That's how I would define revenue leakage. And many a time you don't detect it until you have a significant financial impact. And usually it's caused by a lot of inefficiencies either in operations, system issues, things of that nature.
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Host1:30
Thank you. Any early signs that you can see of revenue leakages?
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Sesh Tirumala1:32
Again, many times you learn lessons and scars, and lessons learned is how you go back in retrospect and look at things. So like I said, typically it doesn't hit until it's a significant financial impact, but there are some proactive measures that you can take. Especially like I mentioned, it's usually due to inefficiencies in processes, it could be operational errors, and many a time it's also because departments are siloed. You have teams that are supporting sales for the first-time sale, then you have customer success teams, then you have renewal teams. So again, I think it's important to make sure that you can connect different departments, different processes, different systems, and then from the learnings, how do you really have an end-to-end value stream process? And at the end of the day, all roads lead to data, so you need to really make sure you look at the data, improve the processes, and then you can begin to automate.
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Host2:28
That's very true. It's something you need to understand, and you need to look at the whole revenue lifecycle to figure out what may be happening. Any examples that you might be aware of that have happened in the past that you would like to share?
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Sesh Tirumala2:44
Yeah, so again, I think from my memory, the common issues are many companies have a quote-to-cash process and you've designed it linear from left to right. And in the world of SaaS, the real fun happens when the customers have deployed the software, right? So it's not the first-time sale, but once you deploy the software, then it comes down to how do you monetize for usage based on the subscription modality and your monetization model. So again, when it comes to usage-based billing, the diligence of the sales team, the customer success team to measure the customer's usage, capturing of the usage of the end customer. So again, I think what I've seen is when your monetization model is fairly complex and you start to go based on usage-based billing, how do you do true-ups, how do you do true-forwards? So that's when you know discrepancies between what your contract tells you, what your invoices tell you, what the customers expect as payments come into effect, right? So that is one example. The second one I've seen is again in terms of pricing and discounting, how you manage that, because there are many customers that have either protected on discount or some on list price, things of that nature. So again, I think as you go through the revenue lifecycle, having the right governance and controls and how you manage your pricing and your discounting is another key area.
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Host4:13
This was very interesting. Thank you, Sesh. And thanks everyone.
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Sesh Tirumala4:18
Thank you, Ravin. Pleasure.
