Sunil Gaitonde, Ph.D.
Sunil is a board member or kPoint technologies and an advisor to a number of technology start-up companies. The last company he co-founded and served as the CEO was kPoint Technologies, a video life-cycle company that makes videos searchable for the enterprise. kPoint was spun out of GS Lab after achieving scale in technology and sales. kPoint is deployed globally with more than 50 enterprise customers. Sunil co-founded Great Software Laboratory (GS Lab) in September 2003 to focus on product development in the area of next generation communication and collaboration infrastructure. GS Lab, using the bootstrapping model, has grown organically to well over a thousand people. GS Lab was acquired by Kedaara Capital, a leading private equity firm.
Sunil served as the Chairman of the board of Sarvega, which he co-founded in Chicago in June 2000. During his tenure as the CEO, Sunil raised two rounds of funding of over $20M during one of the most difficult times in the high-tech industry. Sarvega, The XML Networking Company™, provided leading products that secure and scale XML-based Web services applications. Under Sunil’s leadership Sarvega deployed the world's first XML appliance in production in 2001 and is the only company to deploy XML networking equipment in Global 1000 enterprises, carriers, and governments worldwide. Sarvega was acquired by Intel in 2005. Sunil joined Cisco Systems in 1995 as a result of Cisco’s acquisition of Internet Junction, and led teams to build appliances such as Cisco Cache engine, Micro Web Server and IpXchange Server. He was also responsible for identifying next generation products, helping Cisco with technical due diligence of successful acquisition targets of over $8B.
Prior to Cisco, Sunil founded Internet Junction in 1994 which became, in 1995, the sixth Cisco acquisition. In the days before TCP/IP became native on windows, Internet Junction made Internet connectivity easy to use for Novell users by providing bridging between IPX and IP protocols in a simple, configuration-less way. Sunil, as the Vice President of engineering, also played a crucial role in convincing Sun to become an OEM partner to deploy Internet Junction’s technology at a rapid pace. Sunil began his career in 1988 at IBM as an architect of distributed file and database systems, helping connect many IBM systems transparently to the applications. He was responsible in designing the models, formats and protocols of IBM’s DDM (Distributed Data Management) and DRDA (Distributed Relational Database Architecture) architectures. In his last 2 years at IBM, he led a team of engineers in an ambitious project to port Open Software Foundation’s Distributed
Computing Environment (OSF/DCE) to IBM’s AS/400. He holds several patents in the field of data communications and has written numerous papers in reputed journals. Sunil has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University and a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India.