The most important part of any car is its engine. But when you open up a Tesla Model S, you won’t find an engine inside it. You will just find a simple rotor powered by a bevy of batteries. That is because the most important part of a Model S is its computer. In fact, Tesla does not make cars. It makes computers that happen to have wheels. And the man responsible for those powerful, networked computers is Jay Vijayan, the Chief Information Officer at Tesla. He is responsible for everything from network security and systems operations to business applications and the infrastructure that keeps these modern day miracles moving. Armed with a Master of Science degree from the University of Madras, Vijayan started his long career at Oracle, where he worked at different Application Management positions. This was followed by a long stint at the cloud and virtualisation software and services giant VMware. There, as a Senior Director of IT Business Applications, Vijayan worked on many business applications including the company’s web portal and has been a key part of the application development part of the business that was instrumental in taking the annual revenues of VMware from around $700 million to $4 billion. Now at Tesla, he supports CEO Elon Musk in running the engineering, manufacturing, sales and service parts of the business by help ing to expand the company into new markets like China. He has several patents to his name.