Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Jagdeep Singh :- Gurpreet Singh

Jagdeep Singh and his company Lightera Networks created the Core Director, an invention deemed so critical to telecommunications networking that last spring optical networking company Ciena bought Singh's young startup for $500 million.


Jagdeep Singh, 32, Stanford University

Today's telecommunications network is woven largely from fiber optics, glass threads that carry thousands of times more information than copper wires. The key to expanding this capacity even further lies in a technology called wavelength division multiplexing, which sends multiple signals down the same fiber, using different colors of light.

WDM requires a sophisticated switch to direct multispectral traffic — and that's just what Jagdeep Singh created at his 1998 startup, Lightera Networks. Their invention, called the Core Director, was deemed so critical to WDM that last spring, optical networking company Ciena bought Singh's year-and-a-half-old startup for $500 million.

Born in New Delhi to the family of a globe-trotting diplomat, Singh landed in the United States and enrolled at the University of Maryland at 15. By 20 he was working for Hewlett-Packard and getting an introduction to telecommunications networking, a field primed for an explosion of demand.

Jagdeep Singh is a prototypical networking entrepreneur who is brilliant, shrewd, and very secretive. In 1993, he started AirSoft, which made software to improve the performance of wireless networks. He also co-founded a number of companies including Lightera Networks, which was acquired by CIENA Corporation in 1999 for $550 million, and OnFibre Communications. He was also a partner at venture capital firm InterWest Partners.

Two of his first three companies were network equipment makers. His fourth, Zepton Networks, is another one and has changed their name to Infinera optical solutions. Before starting his fourth venture Infinera, he was cofounder and CEO of OnFiber Communications, a telecommunications carrier deploying next generation fiber optic network.

Before founding OnFiber in 1999, Jagdeep was president and general manager of Ciena Corporation\'s Core Switching Division (CSD) and served as a director of Ciena Corporation. He joined Ciena, a leader in the optical communications equipment market, after the acquisition of Lightera Networks. At Lightera, he served as president and CEO and led the company from startup to a leadership position in the market for optical switching equipment for telecommunications networks.

Prior to founding Lightera, Jagdeep was a venture partner at the venture capital firm InterWest Partners, focusing on investments in the data communications and telecommunications sectors. Before joining InterWest, Jagdeep was vice-president, technology strategy at Shiva Corp. He joined Shiva following its acquisition of AirSoft, Inc., where he was president and CEO. Prior to founding AirSoft, Jagdeep held technical and marketing positions at Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

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