Kumar Malavalli is an

Indian American Indian Americans are Americans whose ancestry originates wholly or partly from India. The terms Asian Indian and East Indian are used to avoid confusion with Native Americans in the United States, Native Americans in the United States, who ar ...

technology entrepreneur and philanthropist. In 1995, he founded

Brocade Communications Systems Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., was 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. Prio ...

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 an American trade association, incorporated in December 1997. It is a registered 501(c)(6) non-profit organization. SNIA has more than 185 unique members, 2,000 active contributing members, an ...

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 California State University system and offers 136 undergraduate and 60 post-baccala ...

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 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 Media, ...

was established in 2004 following a $1 million donation from Malavalli. Professor Darrell Long currently holds the Kumar Malavalli Chair. Malavalli is a member of the Silicon Valley Hall Engineering Hall of Fame.

Early life and education

Malavalli was born in early March 1943 in Mysore, Karnataka, India. He moved to Düsseldorf, Germany in 1972 following his graduation from the National Institute of Engineering 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 ( , locally pronounced or ) is the most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the fourth-most populous city in North America. The city ...

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. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

. 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 Server (computing), servers in storage area networks (SAN) in ...

. 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 device, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access Computer data storage, data storage devices, such as disk ...

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 InMage was a computer software company based in the US and India. It marketed a product line called Scout that used continuous data protection (CDP) for backup and replication. Scout consisted of two product lines: the host-offload line, which ...

, 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 NCIT ...

’ 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 cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike oth ...

vendor, in 2009 with Puneet Pandit. He also serves as chairman of the company. Malavalli was appointed

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, known since 2011 as simply Pearson, is the educational publishing and services subsidiary of the international corporation Pearson plc. The subsidiary was formed in 1998, when Pearson plc acquired Simon & Schuster's educatio ...

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 or little cornfields) is a city in Santa Clara County, California, part of Silicon Valley and the broader San Francisco Bay Area. Located on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, it is bordered by San Jose, California, S ...

. 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. It also runs the ServiceCorps Fel ...

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 Mysore People from Mysore district People from Karnataka