Dr.Saragur M. Srinidhi, Managing Partner- Prometheus Consulting
Dr.Saragur M. Srinidhi received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cleveland State University, USA in 1988 and 1992, respectively. He was a Telecommunications Consultant with BP America in Cleveland, Ohio and later with NASAs Lewis Research Center at Cleveland where he was a Senior Consulting Engineer with the High-Performance Networks Group. As a Principal Investigator for NASAs Advanced Communications Technology Satellite (ACTS) experiments, he was recognized as a pioneer in hybrid ATM networking over satellites and has extensively worked on prototyping wide-area ATM networks in support of dispersed applications.
Saragur was the Country Manager for FORE Systems Inc., a worldwide leader in high performance networking products based on ATM technology and managed the business operations in the South Asian region since 1996. He continued as Head of SAARC operations for Marconi Communications PLC after their acquisition of FORE Systems. Saragur left Marconi in 2002 to establish a start-up company to design and develop a first mile access public Ethernet device. Dr. Srinidhi currently heads Prometheus Consulting, a global technology consulting firm specializing in due diligence studies on technology, investment analysis and regulatory studies. He is recognized as an International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Expert in Telecommunications. He is a lead consultant to India’s Center for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) for the National Grid Computing Initiative – Garuda. He serves on the investment committees of UTI Venture Funds and Government of India’s Technology Development Board where he plays an active role in the identification and evaluation of investment opportunities. Dr. Srinidhi is a member of the Graduate Faculty at Cleveland State University and a Senior Member of the IEEE.
Dr. Rao Mikkilineni, Founder & CTO – Kawa Objects Inc.
Dr. Rao has over 29 years of experience in both Telecommunications and IT industries. He has held research and senior management positions at AT&T Bell Labs, Bellcore, US West, Network Programs Inc, SS8 Networks, and LightSand Communications. Most recently, he held the position of Director, storage systems and services engineering at Comstock Systems, which was later merged with Hitachi Data Systems Inc., in USA. Dr. Rao brings a deep knowledge of the storage industry, exceptional technical expertise and a proven track record of success. His practical experience in applying leading-edge technologies to radically improve productivity and quality of Operations and Management in telephony, IP networking and storage networking provides a unique perspective on the role of enterprise systems and distributed computing technologies. He has written many papers on application of virtualization, new approaches to storage service delivery, object oriented technology, Video on Demand services management, AI and Expert Systems in improving Telecom and IT operations & management, and software productivity.
Dr. Rao currently chairs the 2nd International Conference on Collaboration in Computing Clouds sponsored by IEEE Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE2010) to be held in Larissa, Greece in June 2010. An alumni of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Dr. Rao obtained his PhD in Physics from the University of California, San Diego, working with Nobel Laureate Physicist Walter Kohn. He also has a Master's Degree from the Japan American Institute of Management Science in Hawaii and Sophia University in Tokyo. He teaches Enterprise Security at Golden Gate University.