Founders & Advisors

Kaviza's founders saw a problem with the cost and complexity of current desktop virtualization (VDI) architectures. And, being serial entrepreneurs, they set out to address this with Kaviza's revolutionary desktop-specific VDI architecture that delivers full virtual desktops at PC prices.

Kaviza's founders leveraged their domain expertise in virtualization, Software-as-a-service, distributed and fault-tolerant computing to create a shared-nothing grid architecture that scales on commodity hardware and eliminates the Capital Expense barrier to VDI. They have founded and run prior venture-backed companies, and are supported by world-class advisors:

Kumar K. Goswami, Co-Founder & CEO

Kumar has a 19-year track record of innovation both at large and small companies. He founded Kaviza based on his experience as Director at HP Laboratories where he led and managed HP's next-generation IT and data-center automation research. In this role, over five years back, he led HP's early VDI initiatives, which included developing prototypes for large financial services customers. Kumar realized in the process how complex and costly current VDI architectures are, and set out to address this with Kaviza. Prior to HP Labs, Kumar was co-founder and president of Kovair from 1999-2002, a CRM company that was a pioneer in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) space. Kovair was recognized as a Top100 Emerging Company by Computerworld, received $20M in funding from tier-one venture capitalists such as NEA and Sutter Hill, and had Fortune 100 customers and partners. Kovair continues to operate successfully. Kumar has a Ph.D. in distributed and fault-tolerant computing from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He was a NASA Graduate Student Research Fellow.

Michael Peercy, Co-Founder & Software Architect

Michael has over 18 years of experience in fault-tolerant distributed computing and developing robust, multi-tenant B2B SaaS offerings capable of handling large load fluctuations.  He was a co-founder of ShortCycles, a NEA-funded Software-as-a-Service company, and the Director of Product Development at Kovair. Michael also led systems management research at IBM Almaden Research Center. Michael has a Ph.D from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in distributed fault-tolerant computing.

Stephen Pollack, Advisor

Mr. Pollack is a seasoned IT veteran, with a strong history of creating products and solutions that exceed customer expectations. He brings nearly 25 years of experience in marketing, sales, development and service of successful commercial software products in a variety of technology and market segments. He most recently was founder and CEO of PlateSpin, a leading solutions provider in the virtualization space where he grew the company into one of North America's fastest growing high tech companies which was sold to Novell in 2008.

Prior to PlateSpin, Mr Pollack held a variety of senior management positions in business, marketing and technical leadership roles with companies such as Fulcrum Technologies (now part of OpenText), FloNetwork (now part of Google), NCR Corporation and as an independent technology consultant. Stephen is a product of Queen's University, where he studied both Math and Computing Science and more recently completed business leadership training at the Ivey School of Business in London, Ontario.

Srinivasa "Venky" Venkataraman, Advisor

An experienced software executive, Srinivasa “Venky” Venkataraman has a strong track record of building successful teams and companies. Most recently he was the CEO of Appstream (acquired by Symantec), where he increased revenues several fold and established partnerships with Fortune 100 companies such as Intel, Dell, and Symantec. Venky was also an advisor to the executive team at Kidaro which was acquired by Microsoft.

Prior to AppStream, Venky served as Vice-President of R&D at Zone Labs where he developed leading personal and distributed firewall technology now installed on over 80 million PCs worldwide, and earlier in his career Venky held product leadership roles at Senterprise and Autodesk.

Venky serves as an advisor to Kaviza, and other companies such as BitTorrent.

Volker Wiora, Advisor & Head of Kaviza's German Operations

Volker Wiora is helping Kaviza grow its presence in Europe through a strategic relationship with Wiora Software Partners, where Volker is founder and Managing Partner. Prior to founding Wiora Software Partners, Volker was part of the executive team at Altiris, Inc. which was acquired by Symantec in 2007. As VP EMEA, he built Altiris' corporate operations in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). Volker was later appointed as CIO with the task of restructuring of the internal information systems and implementing effective processes for ensuring increased product quality worldwide. Volker now brings his expertise to help software companies build out their presence in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). For more inforamtion, visit Kaviza's German language site at http://www.kaviza.de.