Fifty nine year old Kumar Malavalli is born in Mysore. He graduated from the National Institute of Engineering, Karnataka. After graduation, he worked briefly with the NGEF, Bangalore. Later, he went to Germany to study industry electronics in the University of Hanover. He holds a master’s degree in industrial electronics from National Institute of Engineering in Dusseldorf.

In 1974, he arrived in Canada. In Canada, he worked with ITT Communications as a design engineer. Later, he worked with Amdahl and Canstar Communciations (a subsidiary of Alcatel). When Hewlett Packard purchased Canstar’s fibre channel group, Kumar moved to HP as a senior fibre channel architect, Hewlett Packard, Canadian Network operation. At HP, Kumar was a key contributor to an industry team that originated the Fibre Channel architecture. All through out, he acquired expertise on fiber channel storage systems technology - a technology that links, at a high speed, computers and storage devices, and enables secure storage of data.

In 1995, he moved to the United States (San Jose, California) to establish a start up by the name Brocade Communications Systems, Inc (BCSI). He is instrument in developing the award-winning BROCADE SilkWormÒ family of fibre channel switches and software. These help connect servers with storage devices through a fibre channel storage area network (SAN) technology. Thereby companies have access and share storage in a high-performance, manageable, and scalable environment. In 1999, BCSI went public. Today, BCSI is a major market player (with about 80% of the market share in the US market). It is a leading provider of fibre channel fabric solutions for SAN technology.

Kumar is considered as the founding force in fibre channel technology (FCT). He is a major contributor for the development of fibre channel standards and has published many reports. He has developed a host of products in the FCT arena and holds patents on Fibre Channel. He used his know-how to develop SAN products. Currently, he is a strategic advisor to the board at BCSI. He is responsible for providing the company a direction. He helps set up product strategy for the company and undertakes projects in SAN arena. His future plans include undertaking those projects that aim at taking SAN technology to the masses.

Besides technology initiatives, Kumar invests sizable amounts on education and health projects in Karnataka.  He had made significant contributions to the Gujarat Earthquake victims.

Board member

Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA)
Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)
UTI Venture Funds Management Company Limited
Edurite Technologies – a project aimed at furthering education

Member

National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS) T 11 Technical Committee

Promoter

Chairman, Eselvee Process Links Private Limited - a BPO

Trustee

Member of the Board of trustees - The American India Foundation (AIF)

Awards

Gene Miligan Award for Effective Committee Management for 2002

Address

Kumar Malavalli,
Brocade Communications Systems Inc.,
1901 Guadalupe Parkway,
San Jose, CA 95131
Phone: (408) 487-8156
Fax: (408) 487-8101
Email: [email protected]