After finishing his PhD in the database area in December 1981, Mohan joined IBM Research in San Jose, working on projects like R*, Starburst, Exotica, and DBCache.
He gave numerous keynotes and other talks on NoSQL, NewSQL, modern enhancements to classic RDBMSs and Big Data.
[2] Mohan has published numerous conference and journal papers in the areas of database, workflow and transaction management, and blockchain technologies.
[18] He is the primary inventor of the ARIES family of recovery and concurrency control methods,[20] and the industry-standard (e.g., X/Open XA) Presumed Abort commit protocol.
"[27] Prof. Alan Fekete of University of Sydney, as part of the abstract of a keynote talk by him in February 1993 said the following: "In the past few years, there have been several exciting advances in transaction management that seem certain to influence future commercial systems.
[30] In a 2003 interview conducted by Marianne Winslett as part of the ACM SIGMOD "Distinguished Database Profiles"[31] series, Mohan discussed the first 20 years of his IBM career.
[5][32][33] That interview provides a historical perspective on the state of the database research and products landscape then and also on Computer Science work in India.
He has often talked about the importance of long-term technical careers with sustained focus in one area to attain excellence and to be effective in innovation.
[37] In a front-page story back in August 2007, Business Standard, one of India's leading newspapers, discussed Mohan's senior most technical position at IBM and elaborated on his patenting activities.
[38] Mohan's research, publications, inventions and technology transfer contributions have been well appreciated both inside and outside IBM over the decades via numerous awards and other recognition.
In February 2009, Mohan was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE) "for contributions to locking and recovery algorithms for database systems".
At the 1999 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), he was honored with the 10 Year Best Paper Award[44][45] for the widespread commercial and research impact of his ARIES work which has been widely covered in textbooks[46][47] and university courses.