Leadership

Michael Tso holds 31 patents and has been a technology trailblazer for over 20 years. At search engine pioneer Inktomi, Michael led engineering for an e-commerce search engine, and designed a network congestion control system for KDDI which later became an industry standard. At Intel, he led the development of web acceleration technology and collaborated with Nokia on NarrowBand Sockets, commonly known as SmartMessaging, which enabled the world's first SMS ringtone download service. Michael participated in Ubiquitous Computing research at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, developing network software for the PARCTab, the world's first wireless, location aware, wearable tablet computer. Michael graduated from MIT with an MS in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, BS in Computer Science, BS in Electrical Engineering, and a minor in Economics. While at MIT, Michael worked with Dr. David Clark on distributed file systems with intermittent network connectivity.

Hiroshi Ohta is a well-known mobile internet pioneer and visionary. For well over a decade at J-Phone, Vodafone Japan, and now Softbank Mobile, he led the development of many "world first" products and services in the mobile communication industry. He led the launch of Skywalker Wireless Internet messaging, world's first photo mail service "Sha-mail", J-Sky Mobile Internet service, world's first location based service J-Sky Station, J-Navi (GPS service), and MIDP extensions which enabled 3D mobile Java gaming, to name a few. Many of them evolved into global-standard services and technologies. At Cloudian, Mr Ohta led the specification and development of the first pan-European Vodafone Live! service in Dusseldorf, Germany. Mr Ohta was the recipient of numerous government awards for his outstanding contributions to the telecommunications industry.

At Cloudian, Giorgio Propersi is responsible for the Americas and EMEA, including Marketing and Strategy, Sales, Business Development, Product Management, Account Management and Technical Support. Giorgio has more than 30 years of experience in complex computer and communication systems, with a solid track record of growing extremely successful companies out of simple ideas and great people. Giorgio founded and grew three successful companies: Trillium Digital Systems (data communications standard protocols, acquired by Intel); Angeli Systems Corporation (directory services, LDAP, X.500, acquired by ISOCOR); and Sourcecom (the first integrated DSL devices, acquired by ACT Networks which then became Clarent, the VoIP leader). In addition, Giorgio was VP Engineering and Founder of uXcomm (which introduced brand new concepts to the management and virtualization of the data center) and the Founder and COO of iVox Networks (the first fully optical IP media gateway). At the beginning of his career, Giorgio designed, developed and deployed the most powerful X.25 router in the market, which became the backbone of the AT&T data network in the '80s. Giorgio holds a Ph.D. in Telecommunications/Computer Science from the University of Rome, Italy.

Jay Desai, a well known veteran of the storage industry, is the Vice President of Product Management at Cloudian and is responsible for Cloudian's overall product strategy and direction. Jay's responsibilities include ensuring that the product strategy aligns well with the market and customer needs and is reflected in the Cloudian's product roadmap. Jay brings 20 years of storage software and high technology experience to the Cloudian management team and has held senior roles for companies in the enterprise storage & software market. Prior to joining Cloudian, he spent 3 years at EMC responsible for the Information Management & eDiscovery product suite. Before EMC, Jay held various product management and product marketing positions at Kazeon (acquired by EMC), NetApp, SGI and Bechtel Corporation. Jay holds an MBA from University of California-Berkeley, Master's degree in Engineering from University of California-Irvine and Bachelor of Engineering from Bombay University.

Gary Ogasawara heads up Cloudian's global development and QA team, with operations in Silicon Valley, Tokyo, and Beijing. Gary has over 15 years of hands on engineering management experience at startups and larger companies. Gary has led the development of all of Cloudian's products and their worldwide carrier deployments. Prior to Cloudian, Gary was Director of Engineering at e-Centives, an e-Commerce search engine company. He also led the development of real time commerce and advertising systems at Inktomi, a leading Internet search engine and CDN gateway company. Gary holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, where he specialized in Bayesian decision theory, uncertainty reasoning and machine learning.

Shinya Motohashi has over 25 years of experience in corporate planning and management at Japan's biggest telecom operators. After graduating from Hitotsubashi University, he joined KDD (now KDDI) and held key posts in corporate management, including service planning, corporate planning, and corporate secretariat office for two decades. As part of Vodafone's global strategy team, Motohashi was responsible for the development of corporate strategy in Japan. At Softbank Mobile, he led its WiMax efforts and was the creation for a joint venture with eAccess/eMobile. He obtained an MBA at the University of Southern California.