Local entrepreneurial stars, Dr. Desh Deshpande (Founder and CEO of Sycamore Networks) and Dr. Devvrat Gupta (Founder and CEO of Narad Networks) were the featured speakers at the IITSINE seminar series held at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Burlington, MA on Friday May 10, 2002. Present in the audience were some of the well-known entrepreneurs from New England.

IITSINE is an organization that was founded by Mr. Puran Dang (Founder, Minuteman Technologies) to serve as an Alumni Association for all the Indian Institute of Technologies. But the membership of IITSINE is open to anyone. Its aim is to promote the professional, intellectual, social, cultural and economic growth of its members.

The event began with a welcome address by Mr. Prem Sinha, the President of IITSINE, in which he gave an overview of the activities of IITSINE, which included technical talks, social events and the institution of the IITSINE award. Dr. Dwarika Agarwal, the past president of IITSINE presented an award of 'President Emeritus of IITSINE" to Mr. Puran Dang for his devotion to the New England Community at large and specifically for his commitment towards the growth of IITSINE.

Dr. Desh Deshpande spoke about the achievements of the IIT alumni over the past several years. "There are 35,000 alumni in the US and their contributions have been phenomenal. This is especially interesting when we consider the cost of training them. The budget of Harvard University alone is equal to amount that India spends on its entire educational system for the country at-large," said Desh. "The value of IITians is so much in building companies like Microsoft that Bill Gates, who rarely takes on speaking assignments, has agreed to speak at the 50th anniversary of the founding of IITs as a token of appreciation for all that the IITians have done towards making Microsoft successful."

He ended his talk with a need to contribute towards education back home. He felt that with better infrastructure and the right Faculty, IITs could emerge as a world-class institution that can compete with the MITs of the world.

Dr. Devvrat Gupta made a presentation about his company Narad Networks. Narad Networks provides a True Broadband™ infrastructure solution comprised of network hardware and service delivery software that enables cable operators worldwide to deliver reliable, premium, carrier-class broadband IP services. "Our target customers are the small to medium scale businesses with about 5 - 500 employees for whom getting high bandwidth connection is currently an expensive proposition," says Dr. Devvrat Gupta.

The Narad Broadband Access Network (NBAN) is a Virtual Fiber™ network solution that provides all the benefits of pure fiber access solutions at a much lower cost by leveraging the coax portion of the existing Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) cable network. "While we are very proud of our excellent hardware, we feel that it is the Narad Services Operating System (NSOS) that is the jewel in our crown since it allows for cable operators to efficiently create and provision services over Virtual Fiber networks to harness the increased capacity and control of high-band-width, switched Ethernet connections," says Devvrat Gupta. The company received a 64 million first round funding and has an excellent board of directors that includes Rouzbeh Yassini, Subra Dravida, Bob Metcalf and others.

There was a wonderful rapport amongst the attendees. Vik Mehrotra of Venus Capital sponsored the event. The event was very well organized. The success of the event was evident when many IITians and non-IITians signed up to become members of IITSINE. The most touching moment of the evening was Mr. Puran Dang's award acceptance speech, where one could see him visibly moved as he said "this is one of the greatest and special milestones in my life". The event ended with a vote of thanks by Dr. Anil Saigal, Secretary of IITSINE.

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