Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2009 Road to Palm Springs Vikram Mehta - Ernst & Young - United States

Entrepreneur Of The Year 2009
Road to Palm Springs

Vikram Mehta

BLADE Network Technologies
Santa Clara, Calif.

Coming from humble beginnings in India, Vikram Mehta has tirelessly pursued what others said could not be done. With a vision of building and delivering the essential data center networking technology that is the heart of the enterprise, Mehta in early 2006 founded BLADE Network Technologies (BNT), a company that provides network infrastructure for next-generation data centers. In just three years, he has propelled the startup into a $100 million company.

As an employee at Nortel, Mehta saw the opportunity for a new kind of intelligent “circulatory system” for data centers. But he could not convince Nortel to back the project, even after securing buy-in from IBM. Undeterred, Mehta quit Nortel and joined Garnett & Helfrich Capital as CEO-in-Residence, winning the company over through persistence. Then, three years after developing his initial concept, he convinced Nortel to spin out BNT. Every member of Mehta’s original Nortel division followed him to BNT, and his perseverance inspired IBM and Hewlett-Packard to take a chance on the new venture as well.

Since its inception, the award-winning company has become the industry's number-one provider of blade server networking, carving out a two-times market share lead over Cisco and becoming one of the leading suppliers of 10 Gigabit Ethernet “cloud-ready” networking switches, which are installed in more than 300 of the Fortune 500.

• Frequently Asked Questions
• Entrepreneur Of The Year Hall of Fame
• Winners Network

• Strategic Growth Forum