Board Members

Sanjay Agrawal

Chief Technology Officer, Hitachi Vantara

SNIA India Chair

As Chief Technology Officer (CTO), at Hitachi Vantara, Sanjay is leading Digital Transformation Solution initiatives for our Enterprise Customers that include solutions around Big Data, Cloud, and Data Center Modernization. As presales head, heading a team of Solution Architects in India and SAARC. This team is responsible for consulting and design of IT solutions related to Data Center Modernizations that includes Server & Storage Infrastructure, Hybrid Cloud, Intelligent Data Governance and Data Driven Insights. Specific Digital initiatives led are- DataOps, Data Lake optimization, Insights into Dark Data, On-demand blending of structured and unstructured data for new business insights, Hybrid Cloud adoption including Application Modernization for shifting workloads to Public cloud, Hybrid IT under DC modernization with optimized Infrastructure around Converged / Hyper Converged systems and Object storage as a part of enterprise data strategy and Data Compliance. Also playing lead role in conducting Digital Transformation workshops for Enterprise customers. These workshops include assessment of current state and recommendations to arrive at desired Digital maturity state with certain initiatives around Data Driven decision making, Cloud acceleration, IT Modernization etc. to accelerate their Digital Transformation journey and shift focus from Operations to Innovation.

Dr Anupam Bhide

Founder and CEO, Calsoft Inc.

Dr. Anupam Bhide is the founder and C.E.O of Calsoft Inc. With more than 22 years of experience in the technology industry, he is widely respected for his integrity, innovative mindset, and dynamism. His visionary leadership combined with deep industry and technology expertise have played a key role in establishing Calsoft Inc. as a leading provider of software product engineering services. Prior to incorporating Calsoft Inc., Anupam led elite development teams at HP, IBM, and Oracle. Under his direction, the teams at Oracle designed key features for Oracle 8 and improved the scalability of Oracle 7.  Before joining Oracle, he served as a Research Scientist at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, New York where he was a founding member of the DB2/6000 Parallel Edition team. At IBM, he also conceived and built one of the first high availability products in the open systems market - the Highly Available NFS File Server.  Anupam holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California-Berkeley. He also has a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from IIT-Mumbai.

Piyush Gupta

Program Director, IBM India Pvt Ltd 

Piyush Gupta is the Program Director with IBM India Pvt Ltd heading its flagship product IBM Flashsystems Development lab in India. He has been with IBM for over 8 years and played various roles with in IBM Storage development lab. In his current role , he lead development of various enterprise storage components like Cloud , storage protocols , security , resiliency , performance , backup and recovery etc etc . He has been in the storage and virtualization industry for over 18 years and played various technical and leadership roles at IBM and previously with  NetApp, VMware and Wipro. Piyush is an eminent technology evangelist  representing IBM storage products and technologies at various global platforms like customer/developer conferences , product launch events and client meets like “User Group Meetings”. Piyush is also frequently engaged in giving back to the society through his association with management and technical institutions as guest speaker. Piyush is an engineering graduate and management certified by IIM. 

Prof. K. Gopinath

Professor, IISc.

Prof. K. Gopinath graduated from IIT-Madras with a B.Tech. degree from University of Wisconsin, Madison with an MS in Computer Science. After working at Advanced Micro Devices as a Product Planning Engineer, he joined Stanford University for a Ph.D.(completed '88). After a brief stint as a PostDoc at Stanford and then at Sun Microsystems Labs, he joined IISc in 1990 where he is now a Professor.  His research interests are primarily in the computer systems area (Operating Systems, Storage Systems, Computer Systems, Security, Software Verification).

Siddhartha Nandi

Independent Board Advisor

Guna Bala Shekar

Guna is a senior semiconductor professional with a strong domain experience in the Storage, Networking and the Data Analytics markets. He used to work for LSI in the Bay Area before moving to Bangalore to work for LSI India (now Broadcom). Besides LSI, he has also worked at successful semiconductor startups in the Bay Area as well as in Bangalore. During his 20+ years at all these companies, he had taken up several challenging senior management roles spanning Engineering, Marketing and Sales.

Guna is now a co-founder for a stealth mode startup that plans to radically change the way telecom service providers monetize the cellular market. The solution innovatively combines the benefit of utilizing unlicensed shared spectrum along with virtualization increasing the quality of experience for the end user at reduced costs.

Shelesh Chopra

Senior Director, Software Engineering, Integrated Data Protection Software, Dell Technologies

Shelesh is a seasoned Product Engineering leader with 20+ years of experience and a track record in building high performing teams that developed products and solutions recognized as best-in-class by the industry. His work includes leading product & process transformations, building organization agility by implementing modern Scrum methodology, building self-sustaining teams, leading and managing critical customer relations and leading global programs and product initiatives. 

Gajanan Kamble

Global Head, Software Product Engineering HiTech ISU, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd

As Global Head Software product engineering services for HiTech vertical. Gajanan drives the vision, strategy, and operations for software product engineering services business for world’s leading technology companies.  Gajanan brings 24 years of product management, engineering and services expertise to his role leading innovation and accelerated software product engineering services. He worked on many TCS and customer product development initiatives. Prior to this role, Gajanan worked with TCS research (TRDDC) for 4 years in the artificial intelligence areas.  

Bhooshan Thakar

Senior Director of Engineering, Veritas 

Bhooshan Thakar is a result oriented professional with proven leadership track-record and a very strong technical background. With 23 years of professional experience in storage & data protection industry, he carries deeper understanding of technology domain, market segment and customer use cases. He built invaluable experience by closely working with large enterprise customers in Financial, Banking, Telco, Airlines verticals across the globe. He has significant experience in building high-performance, highly capable engineering organisations that consistently deliver products with critical business value. He is working with Veritas for past 11 years in India in a senior leadership role. At Veritas, he has helped build industry leading Application Resiliency & Data Protection products by seamlessly adapting to ever-changing technologies such as virtualization, Kubernetes Containers and Cloud. He has Masters in Computer Architecture from Iowa State University (USA) and he currently holds 2 patents with US PTO. He is happily married to his best friend from college and they have 2 kids

Madan Udaykumar

Director, Head of Solution PE, Memory Solutions, Samsung Semiconductor (SSIR) 

Engineering Leader with over 23 years of experience in Product Development & Test Engineering, Storage Solutions, IoT, Distributed & Real-time systems, Embedded Systems & Platforms and Internet Protocols. 

Leading Solution product engineering team at Samsung Semiconductor for Flash based Memory products – SSDs (NVMe/SAS/SATA), UFS, eMMC, MicroSD, PSSD, Storage Solution (AFA).  Primary focus is on E2E Product Test engineering, Customer Support functions.  

Previously Led cross functional teams across Engineering, Architected Test Programs, Automation frameworks, Solutions right from planning, design, implementing and executing successfully for IoT Platforms & Products at Intel start-up (now Telit). 

Prior to this played various technical and leadership roles at Wipro Technologies, worked in Embedded Platforms at Wind River, Distributed and Real-time systems at Lucent Technologies (Bell Labs) and Airbus. 

In free time, I like to tinker and develop IoT applications for Smart Home and other IoT use cases. 

Arvind Saraswat

Associate Vice President – Engineering, Head of Unstructured Data Storage Lab at Huawei Technologies India.

Arvind has over 23 years of experience in Product Engineering, Research and Innovation. Under Arvind’s Leadership, Huawei India has been able to establish key businesses in diverse domains like Storage Data Protection and Middleware Platforms for Intelligent Services. These business areas have strategically grown and have unique positioning in the overall Huawei's Business. He is currently the Business Head for Unstructured Data Storage Lab and is leading development of multiple products in Storage, Data Management and Data Virtualization domains.

In his earlier roles at Huawei, Arvind’s technology leadership has been instrumental in adding key products in Universal Access/Resource Platforms, and Application and Middleware Platforms for Intelligent Services to Huawei's Portfolio. These products have stood the test of time over a decade and have added significant value to Huawei's growth story.

Arvind’s team continues to collaborate with the technology community in two key directions of SODA foundation (Data Management Technology) and Openlookeng (Data virtualization engine). There are also vast number of Huawei India Engineers who are open source committers and PMC members. His team further bridges the gap between academic and Industry researchers and continues with several collaborative researches with the Indian and Overseas academia. 

Arvind is in the Board of SNIA to grow and build solid grounds for Storage researchers in India and worldwide.