Balan Sethu Raman (Sethu) is a Distinguished Engineer in the Database Systems Group. He started his engineering career aspiring to be a hardware designer. Things took an interesting turn while building tools for hardware design, when he discovered that he found designing data structures to handle large amounts of data exciting. His career choice in software was cemented when he joined Microsoft.

As a software engineer in the Windows group Sethu worked on various aspects of file systems. His work ranged from developing network file systems and client side caching to distributed file systems. During this period he recognized the need for richer services to cope with the growing amounts of digital data, and he pioneered efforts across divisions to address this need.

Sethu started working with the Microsoft SQL Server team to design better solutions for storing blobs in a database and offer richer services within the product’s infrastructure.   Since then he has been designing and developing features for building innovative applications to incorporate various kinds of data.

Sethu soon recognized the importance of handling data streams because of the proliferation of data sources and the volumes of data being generated by them. He subsequently embarked on building an incubation effort for handling data streams in conjunction with Microsoft Research. He is currently focused on translating this into a product offering and manages the team responsible for it.

Outside of work Sethu keeps his curiosity alive by picking a new activity every year, pouring his energy into it, and becoming proficient at it.  He can often be found running the trails near campus or developing his swimming skills. He also enjoys spending time with his wife and helping their son realize his dreams.