Dr. Jikku Venkat runs Product Management for Progress Health Cloud and enjoys the challenge of taking innovative technology concepts and making them successful enterprise-ready products. Previously, Dr. Venkat led product management for Kinvey, an industry recognized market leader for cloud-based application platforms. For the past 14 years, Dr. Venkat has been involved with startup companies in healthcare technology, enterprise software, Cloud, SaaS, and Virtualization areas. He has built successful Engineering, Product Management, Customer Services organizations from the ground-up at Draker Energy (IoT, SaaS for the solar industry) and Virtual Bridges (Desktops in the Cloud) and United Devices (Grid/Cloud Computing). As Co-Founder and CTO at United Devices, he pioneered the concept of Grid computing for HPC and business applications, a pre-cursor to the IaaS products of today. These products have been used successfully at Global 2000 companies and won awards internally and in the industry. Dr. Venkat enjoys the opportunity to evangelize products with enterprise customers, press, analysts, and investors. The thrill
Mr. Venkat has 6 patents issued and was named CTO of the Year in 2002. He has a Ph.D, M.S in Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and a B.E. (Honors) from NIT-Trichy, India. In his spare time, he loves mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs. He was President/BoD member of TiE-Austin and started the TiE Young Entrepreneur (TYE) program in Austin – a startup competition for high-school students. The Austin team went on to win the global competition in its inaugural year.