Management

In July 2005, Vikram joined Garnett & Helfrich Capital as CEO-in-Residence and brokered the alliance between Nortel and Garnett & Helfrich Capital to establish BLADE as an independent company. Prior to that, Vikram spearheaded the founding of Nortel’s Blade Server Switch Business Unit (BSSBU). Vikram came to Nortel in 2000 through its acquisition of Alteon Web Systems, the leading provider of Web and application switches.

At Alteon, he led the company’s strategic alliances and laid the foundation for what would later become BSSBU. Prior to Alteon, he served as Vice President of Marketing at Ensim, a leading supplier of service enablement and automation software for hosted IP and application services. Before Ensim, Vikram spent 12 years at HP in various leadership and executive positions across the company’s diverse operations in India, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong and the US. His last position at HP was General Manager, Enterprise Servers, North America Region. Vikram is an Electrical Engineer from the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, India. 

Read his blog at: http://www.bladenetwork.net/CEO-Blog.html.

Mark Verbeck
Chief Financial Officer

Prior to Wall Street, Mark worked at Deloitte & Touche (now Deloitte), the global accounting and consulting company. In this role, he worked with many Fortune 500 companies on information technology strategy and implementation.

Mark started his career in a finance position that evolved into a leadership role in finance and information technology at a small Midwest land development company that experienced rapid growth during his tenure.

Mark has a BA in accounting from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota.

In the years before joining Tandem, Bob was President and CEO of high performance graphics workstation maker, Saber Technology,  Previous to that, he was Vice President of Manufacturing at image processing provider, Vicom Systems. Early in his career Bob served in various manufacturing operations and materials roles at Fairchild/Schlumberger Test Systems, the tape drive division of Pertec Computers and the calculator division of Texas Instruments.

After graduating from college, Bob served as an Engineering Duty Officer in the U.S. Navy. He earned a B.A. in Political Science (International Relations) from California State University at Northridge and has been certified in Production and Inventory Management (CPIM) by the American Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS).

Previously, Jim was Financial Controller for HP’s Scalable Network Solutions Operation, a worldwide business unit that developed and delivered SAN technologies and storage software. He has also served as Financial Controller for HP’s ProCurve networking business. Under his financial leadership, HP’s ProCurve business developed and deployed a number of successful business strategies including off-shore manufacturing, ODM product development, and alternative go-to-market models. Prior to his many contributions to the networking businesses, Jim was the General Accounting Manager for HP’s North American Distribution Operation a multi-billion dollar operation serving the sales and distribution needs for all HP products.

Prior to working at HP, Jim spent five years in commercial finance at ITT and General Electric Credit Corp. He has a bachelor’s degree in general management from Purdue University.
 

Clive established HP’s position in enterprise storage by building strong product and channel programs with EMC, Hitachi, Clariion, and Storagetek. As worldwide marketing manager and Mass Storage Operations manager, he grew these businesses from inception to major revenue streams (>$1B) for HP. He also established HP’s program in storage management software with the acquisition of Transoft Networks and led the storage software business for over 2 years. As part of the acquisition of Transoft Networks, Clive managed a separate, wholly owned subsidiary of HP which had completely separate business functions of sales, R&D, marketing, supply chain, and finance. For the HP/Compaq merger, Clive was the senior executive for HP leading the merger planning for storage. His responsibility was to create an overall plan for the merger of the HP and Compaq storage businesses covering R&D, Product Roadmaps, Go-to-Market strategy, partnerships, financial plans, supply chain, and personnel.

Prior to his work in storage, Clive led the HP9000 Unix Server channel and ISV partner program. He developed the ISV program from its beginning into a major differentiator that drove over $700M in HP9000 sales annually. This included building key partnerships with Oracle, SAP, Informix, Sybase, Peoplesoft, and many others. He also managed the HP9000 reseller program and established HP’s first 2-tier distributor channel for servers and several OEM partnerships.

Clive is Founder and President of his own management consulting business, Agora Research. He specializes in assisting executives and senior managers with business, marketing, channel, and product strategies along with the implementation of these strategies for storage, networking, and server companies. Clive has also held the positions of Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer for Exanet, Inc. and member of the advisory board of Storactive, Inc..

Clive has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and an MBA, both from the University of California, Berkeley.
 

Previously, Atul worked as VP of Engineering for Templex Technologies, a start-up in optical networking, which was acquired by Intel in 2001. Before Templex, Atul was working as a VP of Engineering for a Broadband Division of Symmetricom Corp, a leader in timing systems for telecom networks.

Before Joining Symmetricom, Atul worked for 16 years at Hewlett Packard in various capacities as R&D project manager, Business Development Manager, Product Marketing Manager, Production Engineering Manager, and Application Engineer.

Atul has 5 patents under his name. He has participated in various standards Committees and presented papers at various conferences including Blade Server Summit, Design Engineering Conference, and Asia Telecom-97. Atul has a MS in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech and a Masters in Electron Device Technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India.
 

Dan’s product experience spans a range of networking product technologies including emerging Ethernet standards, InfiniBand, security, load balancing, content aware networking, and high-availability products at companies such as Alteon WebSystems, Wang Labs, and Proteon Networks. At Alteon, he managed several generations of product lines, from the initial launch of the Web Switch through the company’s IPO and acquisition by Nortel. In addition Dan has consulted to numerous Silicon Valley start-ups, developing business plans and product strategies.

Dan started his career as a hardware designer developing networking products. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland and an MBA from Boston University.

James (Jim) Varner
General Manager, DataCenter Technologies

Jim Varner, General Manager of DataCenter Technologies, a subsidiary of BLADE Network Technologies in Raleigh, North Carolina, comes to us with over 30 years of technology, systems and business development experience at IBM. Most recently, Jim was Program Director for IBM BladeCenter and Telco Solutions development where he was responsible for customer/partner relationships and product delivery to enable over $750M of annual revenue and annual double-digit growth. 

Previously in the IBM Server Division, he was responsible for initiating OEM Sales of IBM’s X86 product line, and was the Product Line Executive for developing the first generation of EXA chipsets for highly scalable servers – to facilitate number one market share and over $1B of annual revenue in this segment for IBM. His efforts earned him two IBM Corporate awards: an “Outstanding Innovation Award” for his leadership in the Telco segment, and an “Outstanding Technical Achievement Award” for the EXA Technology Development.

Before joining the IBM Server Division, Jim held a variety of increasingly responsible management positions in IBM’s Microelectronics Division and has extensive experience in Manufacturing Operations, Inventory Management, Quality and Test Assurance, ASIC Semiconductor Technology and Test Engineering where he is a holder of 2 patents.

Jim holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Youngstown State University.