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.

Steve Smith
Vice President of Operations

With a career that spans over 25 years in the forefront of computer, networking, and semiconductor industries, Smith has a deep background in global management of technology manufacturing, engineering, and operations.

As Vice President of Operations, Steve Smith is responsible for overseeing all aspects of Azul Systems operational excellence, including manufacturing, operations management, supply chain design component sourcing, logistics and order administration.

Prior to joining Azul Systems, Steve was the Senior Director of manufacturing operations at Brocade Communications. He lead and developed a proactive team whose responsibilities included life cycle component management, supply base engineering and management, and supplier quality engineering. He also lead the integration of acquired company’s manufacturing teams.

Previously, Smith was Senior Director of Commodity Management at Cisco Systems. He created and lead an organization to manage the global supply chain of electronic commodities for Cisco Systems where he consistently exceeded key metrics which included cost reduction, quality and continuity of supply.

Before joining Cisco, Steve was Vice President of Operations for Advanced System Product, was an engineering Director at Maxtor, and held senior engineering management positions at Intel, which included an expatriate assignment to Korea.

Smith holds a BSEE from the University of California Los Angeles.

Ram Appalaraju
Vice President of Technology and Product Marketing

With more than 23 years of information technology related experience and a proven track record of delivering on company promises with customers, Ram has been named Vice President of Marketing and is responsible for leading worldwide-wide marketing strategy and execution of Azul Systems enterprise server solutions.

Ram’s areas of technical specialty include systems architectures, operating environments, middleware, and IT transformation services. He has offered extensive consultative guidance for Global 1000 customers on business and IT topics, and has also authored several technical articles relating to his areas of interest.

Prior to Azul, Ram was a Vice President at HP, responsible for leading a company-wide marketing strategy and execution of Adaptive Enterprise solutions for Enterprise customers. During his 11 year experience at HP, Ram held a number of senior marketing executive positions for servers and systems software including HP’s Unix system software. 

Prior to that Ram held marketing management roles at Digital Equipment Corp. and General Electric.

He holds a B.S.E.E. from the University of Madras India, an M.S.E.E. from Northeastern University, Boston Massachusetts, attended M.B.A. program at the University of Rhode Island and executive leadership program at Stanford University.

John Brennan
Vice President of Hardware

John Brennan brings more than 25 years of experience to his role of leading the hardware engineering team at Azul. John has led the development of highly scalable computer systems (up to 1024 CPUs) in addition to having led the development of state of the art microprocessors.

Prior to joining Azul, John was the Vice President of Engineering for Professional and Embedded Solutions at NVIDIA, leading a team which developed standalone Graphics solutions for use in professional workstations.

Prior to NVIDA, John was the Vice President of Engineering for Chelsio communications where he led both the HW and SW development of a 10Gbit ethernet protocol offload product.

Prior to Chelsio, John spent 4 1/2 years at Sun Microsystems where he was Vice President of Hardware Engineering for the midrange and highend server products. At its peak, this product line generated ~$4Billion of annual revenue which represented about 25% of the revenue for Sun Microsystems. While at Sun, John led the development of the Sun Fire 3800, 4800, 6800, E15k, E25k and their follow-on products.

Prior Sun, John spent 9+ years at Silicon Graphics where he led the development of the Origin 3000 server product line (a distributed shared memory machine which scaled up to 1024 CPUs). the development of the R10000 microprocessor, and the development of the R8000 microprocessor.

John has been in the computer industry since 1981; during this time he as always been involved in the development of either advanced CPUs or multiprocessor systems. He has worked Magnuson Computer Systems, Synapse Computer, Cydrome, and Tandem Computers.

John graduated from University of California at Berkeley with a BS degree in Electrical Enigineering and Computer Science. He also holds a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.