Dish Network announced the appointment of Kannan Alagappan as chief technology officer (CTO).
Kannan Alagappan will be reporting to Dish Network CEO Erik Carlson.

Dish Network in 2018 appointed Suma Nallapati as chief digital officer and Atilla Tinic as chief information officer. Earlier, Vivek Khemka was the chief technology officer of Dish Network.

Before joining Dish Network, Kannan Alagappan has held technology leadership roles with major telecom and cloud services providers, including Reliance Jio, Telstra and Rackspace.

Kannan Alagappan will lead DISH Technologies, playing 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.

The profile of Kannan Alagappan indicates that he has held various technology leadership roles. He served as CTO and head of Technology for Australian telecom operator Telstra – managing software engineering centers across the globe and changed Telstra’s approach to product development and software engineering.

Prior to Telstra, Kannan Alagappan served as senior vice president of Data Center, Cloud and Product Engineering at Reliance Jio, a leading telecom operator in India with 330 million 4G subscribers. At Jio, Kannan Alagappan was responsible for creating cloud data centers across India, setting up cloud operations to manage over 100 million customers.

Kannan Alagappan also served as vice president, Strategy and Transformation Services of cloud-computing leader Rackspace Hosting, where he managed a team of engineers that helped several enterprises adopt and migrate to the cloud, and also adopt Agile, DevOps and SRE software engineering practices.

Kannan Alagappan has worked as a technology consultant for Fortune 500 companies, including Comcast, T-Mobile and DISH. He has primarily helped companies implement digital transformations and build technology platforms at scale.