network-virtualization
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Pankaj Thakkar Wants the Cloud to Keep Its Receipts
Before he asked companies to own their observability data, Pankaj Thakkar helped make networks programmable. Now the Kloudfuse co-founder and CEO is applying the same instinct to telemetry: open the system, expose the machinery and make the bill predictable.
Humayun Sohel Built the Invisible Systems - Then Built a Business Around Them
Before cloud migration became a boardroom phrase, Humayun Sohel was working closer to the machine. His path from embedded systems and optical-network firmware to Questivity offers a useful lesson in turning technical depth into practical judgment.
Questivity
Questivity is a Santa Clara IT infrastructure integrator and training house. Founded in 1999, it designs, deploys, and supports the unglamorous plumbing of enterprise technology - networking, security, servers, storage, and virtualization - for mid-size and large organizations, and runs a parallel learning arm that hires, trains, and deploys engineers in Cisco, VMware, and data center disciplines. Its pitch is vendor-neutral: solve the client's problem with the right gear, on budget, rather than whatever a single manufacturer is selling.
Milin Desai
Milin Desai is the CEO of Sentry, the developer-first error monitoring and application performance platform trusted by over 4 million developers and 100,000+ organizations. A computer engineer by training with a master's from USC, Desai spent nearly a decade at VMware scaling the NSX network virtualization product line into a billion-dollar business before joining Sentry in January 2020. Under his leadership, Sentry raised a $90 million Series E in 2022 (total funding $219.75M), achieved unicorn status at a $3B+ valuation, surpassed $100M ARR, and grew to process 790+ billion events per month - all while staying true to its open-source, developer-first ethos and charging one-third of what competitors ask.
Martin Casado
Martin Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz leading the firm's infrastructure practice. A Spanish-born computer scientist and entrepreneur, he pioneered software-defined networking (SDN) by inventing the OpenFlow protocol during his Stanford PhD. He co-founded Nicira Networks, which VMware acquired for $1.26 billion in 2012, where he then scaled the networking and security business to $600 million in annual revenue. An ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award winner, Casado now invests in cutting-edge infrastructure and AI companies, serving on boards of over a dozen startups while shaping the future of enterprise technology and AI regulation policy.