Executives

Scott Sellers
President, CEO and Co-Founder

With more than 18 years of successful leadership in building high technology companies and delivering advanced products to market, Scott provides the overall strategic leadership and visionary direction for Azul Systems. Scott has a consistent proven track record of vision, leadership, and success in enterprise, consumer and scientific markets.

Prior to co-founding Azul Systems, Scott founded 3dfx Interactive, a graphics processor company. Scott served at 3dfx as Vice President of Engineering, CTO and as a member of the board of directors and delivered 7 award-winning products and developed 14 different chips. After a successful initial public offering, 3dfx was later acquired by NVIDIA Corporation.

Prior to 3dfx, Scott was a CPU systems architect at Pellucid, later acquired by MediaVision. Before Pellucid, Scott was a member of the technical staff at Silicon Graphics where he designed high-performance workstations.

Scott graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor of science, earning magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors. Scott has been granted 8 patents in high performance graphics and computing and is a regularly invited keynote speaker at industry conferences.

To contact Scott directly, please email him at: president@azulsystems.com

Shyam Pillalamarri
Vice President of Software Engineering, Co-Founder

Shyam Pillalamarri brings over 15 years of expertise to Azul in transforming technology research into real-world product innovation. As Vice President of Software Engineering, Shyam is instrumental in developing a clear and focused vision for the company’s software efforts and providing strategic direction to Azul product teams.

Prior to co-founding Azul Systems, Shyam was Vice President of Software Engineering for the IP Services business unit at Nortel Networks, having joined Nortel through their acquisition of Shasta Networks. At Shasta Networks, Shyam led the software development organization, from inception to product delivery, for the innovative Shasta Broadband IP Services Platform.

Shyam was Director of Software Engineering at ZeitNet/Cabletron where he led the development of various ATM products and core ATM protocol software. Shyam also held management and engineering positions at Hewlett Packard, where he led several TCP/IP, OSI and STREAMS development projects on their Real Time and UNIX platforms.

Shyam holds a MSCS degree from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree from IIT, Madras, India. He has been granted four patents in high performance computing and communications.

Gil Tene
Vice President of Technology and CTO, Co-Founder

With almost two decades of technology engineering successes, Gil guides Azul Systems architectural vision and product design to align with business and market opportunity strategies.

Prior to co-founding Azul Systems, Gil was Director of Technology at Nortel Networks, having joined Nortel through the acquisition of Shasta Networks. Gil architected Shasta’s Broadband IP Services Platform and Service Creation System.

Before joining Nortel, Gil was Director of Technology at Check Point Software Technologies where he delivered several industry-leading traffic management solutions, including the industry's first Firewall-1 based security appliance in partnership with Nokia.

Prior to Check Point, Gil held numerous management and design engineering positions at industry-leading companies including Stratus and Qualix Communications.

Prior to working for commercial companies, Gil served in the Israeli Navy Computer R&D Unit. Gil also holds a BSEE from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He is a member of numerous technology advisory boards and has been granted three patents in computer technology.

George W. Gould
Vice President of Marketing and Business Development

With more than 22 years of experience in marketing, product management and technical sales at leading enterprise hardware and software companies, George provides marketing leadership and business strategy for Azul Systems.

Prior to joining Azul, George was Business Unit Executive at BEA Systems, running the AquaLogic Service Bus Platform group. Other positions at BEA included Managing Director of the AquaLogic Center of Excellence and Director and Business Manager of BEA’s TP Platform, including BEA Tuxedo.

Before joining BEA, George was Co-founder and VP of Products for Rearden Commerce, a SaaS-based enterprise services company. He was also Director of Products and Marketing at Amplitude Software, acquired by CriticalPath in 1999, and at CenterView Software, acquired by Informix in 1997.

Additionally, George has held marketing, sales and engineering positions at Pyramid Technology and Digital Medical Systems. George holds an MBA from Berkeley and a BSEE from Tufts University.

Patrick J. Conte
Senior Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations

With more than 25 years of experience in successfully scaling companies from a pre-revenue to post, Pat will now lead the worldwide field operations for Azul Systems.

Prior to joining Azul, Pat served as President and CEO of Agiliance, an enterprise software company focused on IT governance, risk, and compliance (IT GRC) solutions, where he led the company’s launch into the market place and early revenue growth.

Previously, Pat ran global field operations at TopSpin Communications, the leading InfiniBand based fabric computing company, where he drove aggressive revenue growth through customers, partners and major system OEMs including Sun, IBM, HP, Dell, NEC, and Hitachi. Pat’s efforts led to TopSpin’s acquisition by Cisco in May 2005.

Prior to TopSpin, Pat was VP of Sales and Marketing at Cobalt Networks and was a key member of the executive management team that took Cobalt public in 1999. Cobalt was aquired by Sun in December 2000.

Pat has also held VP, Executive VP and General Manager roles at Teneros (high availability email appliances), Netscaler (network traffic management and security products, acquired by Citrix),  Dynamic Pictures (3D graphics systems, acquired by 3DLabs) and Wyse Technology (displays and thin clients).

Pat earned a BS in History and Political Science, with Magna Cum Laude honors from James Madison University, and holds an MS in International Relations, with honors from Northern Illinois University.