Winner
Emerging
Just three years after the inception of his
company, Vikram Mehta’s technology is being used at 300 of the Fortune 500 companies.
From his humble beginnings in India — where he was labeled “learning challenged” and earned a dollar a day — Mehta made his way to a job at Nortel, where he saw the opportunity for a new kind of intelligent network “circulatory system” for data centers. Along with Nghiem Chu, Andy Gram and Bill Nelson, he hatched the business plan for what he envisioned the idea could become.
But even after he got buy-in from IBM on the new system, Nortel declined to back it. It took three years, but he finally convinced Nortel to spin out BLADE Network Technologies Inc., got IBM and Hewlett-Packard to take a chance on the new venture and got every person in his original Nortel division to follow him to the new company, at which Mehta serves as president and CEO.
Three years later, BLADE has achieved Mehta’s vision to build and deliver the essential data center networking technology that is the heartbeat of the enterprise, and the company is the world’s No. 1 provider of blade server networking, with a 48.5 percent share of the market, two times the share of its closest competitor, Cisco. Its switches can be found in 1.2 million HP Bladesystem, IBM BladeCenter, NEC SIGMABLADE and Verari Systems servers at some of the world’s largest companies, ensuring that their business services are available and secure, and avoiding consequences such as lost revenue, unhappy customers and security vulnerabilities.
And its technology not only serves its clients but the environment, as well. Mehta has implemented a “green mandate,” and recently introduced a switch that only uses the power equivalent of two light bulbs, leading the company to be recognized by AlwaysOn as the first green networking company.
How to reach: BLADE Network Technologies Inc., (408) 850-8999 or www.bladenetwork.net
