Rewarding Reroute

ICE PEOPLE: Sam Srinivas

sold his three-year old Silicon Valley start up Neotaris Inc to NetScreen Technologies exactly two years ago, little did he realise he would end up half a world away.

But that's exactly what happened when NetScreen was sold, in turn, to Juniper Networks last year and Srinivas found himself in Bangalore as its chief technologist, reporting to the company's founder and chief technology officer Pradeep Sindhu in Sunnyvale, California.

"The move seems curious because usually people sell off their companies and start a new venture," says Srinivas, adding: "I enjoyed my stint at NetScreen, and Juniper is a great place to be in."

Srinivas believes that the only brand that has the potential to rival Cisco is Juniper "though we're much smaller". Relocated to the company's Bangalore engineering centre two months ago, he's set himself a goal to develop products exclusively from India.

"My aim is to have full product ownership and we're already moving in that direction," says Srinivas.

The enterprise router, he says, has been produced substantially out of India. For the time being, however, Srinivas is busy absorbing the changes that he's seeing in India, a country he left 20 years ago.

"One of the best changes is that the educated have a sense of optimisn and global confidence." Srinivas, who grew up in Lucknow and Delhi studied at IIT-Madras and later at University of California, Berkeley. He also completed his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1995.

Now that he's back in India, Srinivas is taking Carnatic music lessons along with his seven-year-old daughter. His other interest is jogging. "But there are no sidewalks in Bangalore" to pursue his hobby. Don't count on that curbing his peripatetic career any time soon.