Kumar Malavalli is an

Indian American Indian Americans or Indo-Americans are citizens of the United States with ancestry from India. The United States Census Bureau uses the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with Native Americans, who have also historically been referred to ...

technology entrepreneur and philanthropist. In 1995, he founded

Brocade Communications Systems Brocade is an American technology company specializing in storage networking products, now a subsidiary of Broadcom Inc. The company is known for its Fibre Channel storage networking products and technology. Prior to the acquisition, the comp ...

with Paul Bonderson Jr. He currently serves as chairman of C3DNA Inc. and as a partner at VKRM Services, a boutique investment firm. He has also served on the boards of the

Storage Networking Industry Association The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a registered 501(c)(6) non-profit trade association incorporated in December 1997. SNIA has more than 185 unique members, 2,000 active contributing members and over 50,000 IT end users and sto ...

and the Fibre Channel Industry Association. Malavalli was presented with an honorary doctor of science degree by

California State University, East Bay California State University, East Bay (Cal State East Bay, CSU East Bay, or CSUEB) is a public university in Hayward, California. The university is part of the 23-campus California State University system and offers 136 undergraduate and 60 pos ...

in 2013. The Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair in Storage Systems Research at the University of California Santa Cruz's

Jack Baskin School of Engineering The Jack Baskin School of Engineering, known simply as Baskin Engineering, is the school of engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It consists of six departments: Applied Mathematics, Biomolecular Engineering, Computational Med ...

was established in 2004 following a $1 million donation from Malavalli. Professor

Darrell Long Darrell Don Earl Long is an American computer scientist and computer engineer who is Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair of Storage Systems Research and Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Malavalli is a member of the Silicon Valley Hall Engineering Hall of Fame.

Early life and education

Malavalli was born in early February 1943 in Mysore, Karnataka, India. He moved to Düsseldorf, Germany in 1972 following his graduation from the

National Institute of Engineering National Institute of Engineering (NIE) is a private engineering college located in Mysore, Karnataka, India. It was established in 1946 and granted autonomy in 2007 from Visvesvaraya Technological University. History NIE was started in 1946 ...

with a bachelor's degree in engineering. After graduating from the Institute of Engineering in Düsseldorf with a master's degree in industrial electronics, Malavalli moved to

Toronto, Ontario, Canada Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anchor ...

Career

In Toronto, Malavalli worked for Canstar Communications’ fibre channel group, which was later acquired by

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

. While at Hewlett-Packard, he served on American National Standards Institute's T11 Technical Committee, which established universal standards for

fibre channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data cen ...

. Malavalli co-founded Brocade Communications, a producer of

storage area network A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from serve ...

s, with Paul Bonderson, Jr. in 1995. Brocade launched in 1998 and went public in May 1999, and its CEO was convicted for illegal backdating of options in January 2008. In addition to being a co-founder, Malavalli served as CTO of Brocade. In 2001, Malavalli co-founded InMage, an independent software company. He was awarded the

International Committee for Information Technology Standards The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), (pronounced "insights"), is an ANSI-accredited standards development organization composed of Information technology developers. It was formerly known as the X3 and NCITS. ...

’ 2002 Gene Milligan Award for his work chairing an INCITS committee, which developed 17 standards for

s. In 2003, Malavalli became the first Indian member of the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. Malavalli co-founded Glassbeam, a

software-as-a-service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is cons ...

vendor, in 2009 with Puneet Pandit. He also serves as chairman of the company. Malavalli was appointed InMage CEO in 2011. Other companies whose boards Malavalli has served on include CryptoMill Technologies and LeadFormix (then-known as LeadForce1). He was also an investor in Edurite Technologies, which was later acquired by

Pearson Education Pearson Education is a British-owned education publishing and assessment service to schools and corporations, as well for students directly. Pearson owns educational media brands including Addison–Wesley, Peachpit, Prentice Hall, eCollege, ...

Philanthropy

In 2004, Malavalli donated $1 million toward the creation of the University of California at Santa Cruz’s endowed Kumar Malavalli Chair in Storage Systems Research. He is also a benefactor of Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research, with donations totaling over $500,000. Malavalli is a co-founder and trustee of the Indus Trust, which builds schools that are not affordable by the middle class population of India. Hindu BL, The Indus Trust is headed by Lt. Gen. Arjun Ray. He is also the principle investor of TeleVital, a company that provides telemedicine services to rural areas in India. Malavalli is the chairman and a funder of the India Community Center in

Milpitas, California Milpitas (Spanish for "little milpas") is a city in Santa Clara County, California, in Silicon Valley. As of the 2020 census, the city population was 80,273. The city's origins lie in Rancho Milpitas, granted to Californio ranchero José Mar� ...

. He also serves as a trustee of the

American India Foundation The American India Foundation (AIF, founded 2001) is a nonprofit American organization working in India. It is one of the largest secular, non-partisan American organizations supporting development work in India. AIF is committed to improving the ...

and

Asian Art Museum of San Francisco The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco – Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture"About"
Asian Art Museum website. ...

. He sits on the board of The Indus Entrepreneurs’ Silicon Valley Chapter and the San Francisco-Bangalore Sister City Initiative. In 2013, Malavalli was awarded the Immigrant Heritage Award for his philanthropic work in the United States and India.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Malavalli, Kumar American technology chief executives Living people 1943 births