Sumeet Solanki

MIMS 2002
Program Manager, Microsoft

What I studied at the I School:

I studied a variety of subjects. One of the I School's strengths is the wide range of courses in diverse fields students can choose from. In particular I learned about the following areas: information management, project management, product development, and technology management.

What I do now:

Since graduating, I have been employed as a full-time program Manager at Microsoft. I work in the MSN division of the company. In particular I work on internationalization of MSN services and software. This includes globalizing, localizing and deploying the services across countries/regions world-wide. These include services such as MSN Search and Microsoft Passport. The knowledge I gained at the I School has time and again been very relevant to my day to day job.

An interesting stop along my career path:

A couple of years ago I got the opportunity to work on MSN Search. We built a complete web search engine from the ground up. It was exciting working on v1 product of high complexity, high visibility, and in a very happening problem space (search engines). Search engines solve the problem of managing vasts amount of complex heterogeneous information available on the Internet. The 202 course taught us a good amount about information retrieval which is very relevant to building search engines.

Information issue that interests me today:

Advertising on the Web. Putting relevant advertisements beside content on the web (be it on search results or any website) has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Still, it accounts for a very small percent of total ad spending in the US (including TV, print, etc.). Internet Advertising has tremendous opportunity for growth. I am keen to see how today's key Internet players (MSN, Yahoo, Google) capitalize on this opportunity, and even more, take advertising to a whole new level. This space presents a great deal of challenging information related issues around privacy, click-through fraud, personalization, providing relevant advertisements, etc.

I School memory:

There are so many fond memories. The exquisite antique South Hall overlooking the beautiful Berkeley tower, the parties at Frederik's, attending the numerous interesting courses. The fondest is the graduation ceremony at the base of the tower.