Sultan of storage

ICE PEOPLE: Sai Gundavelli

He recharges his batteries by watching old Hindi movies, playing with his two-year-old daughter and helping his geeky son on the PC.

At other times, he's huddled with Fortune 500 customers to provide enterprise data archiving and storage solutions. It's all in a day's work for the sauve and mild-mannered Sai Gundavelli, CEO of Sunnyvale (Ca.)-headquartered Solix Technologies.

This Hyderabad native would certainly make the tech-savvy former Andhra Pradesh chief minister proud. Holding a masters degree in mechanical engineering from Oklahoma University, Gundavelli has carved a niche for himself in Silicon Valley by building one of only four companies worldwide that provide enterprise archiving and data solutions, and has partnered with the likes of Oracle, SAP, HP and IBM.

"One of the biggest challenges faced by IT companies today is archiving and data security. The demands will grow manifold in the next five years," he says.

Prior to founding Solix technologies, Gundavelli managed key product portfolios at technology leaders like Cisco Systems, Arix Corp. and Modular Integrated Systems. However, he was was quick to realise the growing need for data management solutions and set up Solix Technologies in 1995.

That start-up is now a $100 million company with offices around the world. But true to his roots, at the heart of his company's operations lies the R&D centre at Hyderabad. "While the US office handles product marketing and project management, all development activity takes place here," says Gundavelli.

Gundavelli says Wipro and Infosys have evinced interest in becoming service vendors for Solix solutions, although he is reticent to go into details of the negotiations. It's not surprising the Indian IT giants are keen to tie up with him.

The worldwide market for data management, currently $60-80 million, is expected to grow to $4 billion by 2007-08. And this sultan of storage solutions is sitting pretty.