About Prem

Prem, who came to this world crying out loud, naked, weak, unable to fend for himself and hungry, has now grown to become a Social CRM evangelist at Cognizant.

With extensive experience in CRM, business process management, quality assurance, and solutions & innovations management, Prem Kumar Aparanji leads the Social CRM initiatives at Cognizant Technology Solutions and evangelizes about it in the external world. Prem has been recognized as a "Social CRM maven" by the community and as a "rising star of CRM" by Paul Greenberg, author of the definitive book "CRM @ the speed of light" as well as one of the world's leading independent analysts in this space.

An ecstatic Om points at GCompris.

In addition to his deep interests in the social web and the free/libre and open-source technology movement, Prem is also known to write on rice grains. On Twitter, where he appears as @prem_k, he’s commonly engaged in — and often leading — conversations using the #scrm hashtag for “social CRM.”

An avid SF&F reader, Prem was initiated into online communities with IRC more than a decade ago & graduated on to ICQ, Yahoo! Chat rooms, various other online forums and also "owns" the unofficial yet largest community for Cognizant on Orkut where he helps the freshers get a grip of whats in store for them after the transition into the corporate world. He has been blogging at http://scorpfromhell.blogspot.com for more than six years now and is also one of the top five bloggers in the internal blogs of Cognizant called Ch1blogs, short for Channel One Blogs, that has more than 65,000 bloggers in the mix.

Born in Tamil Nadu, India into a Telugu family, Prem grew up for the most part in Orissa in a township/colony environment of Paradeep Phosphates Limited. After his Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, Prem joined Cognizant and began his career as a PegaSYSTEM guy. He met Shalini online, no not in a chat room, but in a matrimony site - the Indian equivalent of a dating site, but one with marriage as the end state - and got married soon after. Prem & Shalini are blessed with a son, Om, a very curious kid with a big appetite for cars. They are currently based out of Bangalore.