Somik Behera
Manager, Software & AI Products at Supermicro
Somik Behera
Manager, Software & AI Products at Supermicro
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Work Experience
General Manager, Software & AI Products
2024 - Current
Building the future software stack for Enterprise Data Center Computing, Cloud Native Computing and AI Computing
Angel/Seed Investor
2013
2019+ Vintage Enterprise Fund My focus in 2019 and beyond is SaaS Enterprise companies that are either moving “hardware functions” to “distributed software”, helping reimagine enterprise software around “move to the cloud” or “move to cloud native”, disrupting entire verticals leveraging born in the cloud/hyperscale datacenter tech & business models. 1) SignalWire (Seed) - Disrupting legacy PBX & Cloud Telephony solutions using FreeSwitch OSS software and AI. Now at Series B($42M raised) and benefiting from Remote Work movement. 2) CloudNatix (Pre-Seed) - Re-imagining existing Cloud Infrastructure to enable efficiency, reducing complexity while improving productivity of Dev and Ops teams using Kubernetes & Containerization OSS software. Now at Seed & $6M raised. 2013 Vintage Marketplace Fund Created, managed & invested in a 2013 Vintage Seed/Angel fund targeting on-demand marketplaces. The fund has produced returns in top 1% of seed funds thus far. 1) ForgeGlobal, FKA Equidate (Seed) - Secondary shares marketplace. Exit at $2B+ 2022 SPAC IPO. 2) AirBnB (Early) - House sharing marketplace. Exit at $100B+ at 2020 IPO 3) Cabify(Seed) - Urban mobility marketplace. Now at $400M+ raised. $1.4B Valuation. $3B Takeout offer. 4) OnFleet (Seed) - Last mile delivery enabler. Now at 42M raises as of Series B. 5) GotIt (Seed) - Tutoring Marketplace. Now at 23M raised as of Series B. 6) Shelf.com (Seed) - Marketplace for your used "things", auto-created, auto-curated. Pivoted to TravelJoy. 7) AirPair (Seed) - Shutdown 8) Camfind (Seed) - Computer Vision and AR startup in operation. 9) Sprig (Seed) - Shutdown. Raised $45M Series B.
Co-Founder & VP of Products
2020 - 2024
Cloud Native Operations Platform that helps optimize your Cloud, AI and Kubernetes environments using Autopilot technology. Observe, Understand, Act & Automate with Autopilot. Drive Autopilot across Multi-Cluster and Multi-Cloud Infrastructure to optimize for compute efficiency, human productivity, development velocity and security defensiveness. Responsible for managing multiple teams across Product, Design, Marketing, Technical Pre & Post Sales, UI engineering, technical and GTM partnerships with CSPs and others.
Head of Products (acquired by Nutanix) - Mesosphere, Data, HPC and AI/ML Products
2015 - 2020
Mesosphere re-branded as D2iQ in 2019, I spent over 4 years at Mesosphere. Acquired by Nutanix in 2023. I led the OSS Adoption and Commercialization of the Apache Mesos, which powers the private clouds of 100s of companies including Apple, Twitter, Netflix, Uber, Verizon, & Paypal. ==== Joined pre-product, pre-revenue start-up as first product leader reporting to founder and built the company & product that grew at 300% YoY with $50M run rate as of 2017 with 100+ large enterprise customers and $270M+ capital raised and ~300 employees. Spearheaded a portfolio of products helping enterprises build modern data driven applications and real time experiences that the modern consumer expects. Head of Product with P&L for Mesosphere assets, DC/OS, Data Services, SDK, Ecosystem+Marketplace Products - D2iQ (Formerly Mesosphere ). Provided direct leadership to 12 product folks and indirect leadership to over 120 person engineering team.
Director of Products DC/OS & Data Services (acquired by Nutanix)
2015 - 2019
Head of Core DC/OS Platform, Data/Platform Services, SDK, Ecosystem+Marketplace Products - D2iQ (Formerly Mesosphere ). Lead product line with 2 Product Managers, 7 Product Owners & 50+ Engineers. Joined pre-product, pre-revenue start-up as first product leader reporting to founder and built the company & product that is today growing at 300% YoY with $50M run rate as of 2017 with 100+ large enterprise customers and $270M+ capital raised. Lead Product Mgmt, Strategy, Technical Alliances, Technical Field Enablement & overall success of efforts around DC/OS, Enterprise DC/OS, Apache Mesos, Data Infrastructure - Specifically Core Infrastructure subsystems such as Resource Management, Containerization, Security, Networking, Storage, Multi-Tenancy, Cluster Management, Windows Containerization, SDK, HDFS, Spark, Cassandra, Kafka, Tensorflow and other distributed systems, Multi-Datacenter & Cluster Federation initiatives. Enterprise DC/OS and all related subsystems - Containerization, Networking, Resource Management, Cluster Operations & Mgmt, Security, Apache Mesos, Infrastructure Partnership & Alliances
Group/Sr Product Line Manager (via Nicira acquisition)
2012 - 2015
Joined VMware again as part of Nicira acquisition in July/Aug. 2012 for $1.26B. Executed technical and organizational integration that propelled creation of $2B+ run rate business for the company by EOY 2016. Held multiple product mgmt leadership roles for multiple product lines. Provide product leadership for ~200 Engineers. This acquisition led to formation of VMware's Networking & Security Business Unit & the VMware NSX product line where I played a key role in all aspects of the product. NSX went from initial release in 2012 (pre-revenue) to a $1B+ run rate business by EOY 2016. Also, helped create strategy, incubate & launch products as part of founding team of VMware’s Cloud Native Apps BU focused on Containers, Resource Managers & Nextgen developer tools & cloud platform. * Led product line & teams around Core NSX & NVP Platform features, API, NSX integrated solution with OpenStack, CloudStack, vCloud Automation Center, vCloud Diector, vSphere & CMP partners. * Created NSX Ecosystem around Operations & Cloud Management Platform with established companies such as EMC, RedHat, Canonical, HP, Suse as well as many CMP start-ups. ** Established the de-facto Virtual networking API via Neutron project and NSX API Platform. * Took early customers like eBay, Rackspace, NTT, AT&T, USDA, Schuberg-Phillis into production -- across Enterprise, Service Providers, Financials & Federal/SLED verticals. * Recognized speaker at Industry events like OpenStack Summit, CloudStack Summit, VMworld, EMCworld, SDN Conferences & RedHat Summit. * Key driver in helping craft VMware's 3rd Platform Strategy - Containers/Resource Managers/Schedulers/Docker/Mesos/Kubernetes & Modern Cloud Native Infrastructure & Applications. Other prior titles: Product Line Manager, Sr. Product Manager
Product Manager (Acquired by VMware for $1.26B)
2011 - 2012
Developed Industry's first Network Virtualization solution. Nicira was acquired by VMware for $1.26B in Aug 2012 and the company had raised a total of $41M. This resulted in a 30x return to investors on capital invested. Product Management, Open-Source & Open Standards Development, APIs and SDKs, Partner Development, Customer Development, Private & Public Cloud Integration Engineering, Professional Services, New Product Introduction and Sales Enablement ● Founding Member – OpenStack Quantum open-source project. ● PM/PMM/TMM functions for Core NVP Product and its Cloud Managment Platform (CMP) integration, API, Network Operations and Ecosystem integration with OpenStack & CloudStack. Trained industry's first WW Field & Sales team on Network Virtualization & CMP. ● Directly partnered with the company's first Telco, Service Provider & Enterprise customers such as Rackspace, NTT(APAC), AT&T, Schuberg-Phillis(EMEA) & eBay, taking them to production and delivering commodity open clouds that are superior in functionality and competitively priced against Amazon’s AWS offering – enabled by industry’s only network virtualization product. Other prior titles: Technical Marketing Manager and Product Integration Specialist
Sr. Member of Technical Staff/Tech Lead (IPO - Aug 2007, $30B+)
2005 - 2011
Developed Industry's first Virtual Infrastructure (vCenter & ESX) & Virtualized Cloud Operations ( vCenter Operations) products. VMware went from a $ 625 MM acquisition by EMC in 2004 (just before I started) to a $ 40B IPO in 2007, and went from 400 employees to 10,000+ by 2011 just before I departed VMware. This IPO resulted in 64x return on Capital Invested for Parent Owner - EMC Corporation. • vCenter Operations 1.0 - Acquisition technical integration of Capacity IQ & Integrien acquisition to create vCenter Operations – 2011 Best overall of interop winner. The product at core of VMware Management Business Unit, achieved the first $10M revenue, today a $1B business. • CapacityIQ 1.0 - Founding Member of “1.0” version of VMware Capacity IQ product, delivered in 9 months –Achieved highest 1st year growth rate for a new solution product. UX & UI Development Lead. • vCenter & ESX 3.0,3.1 & 4.0 and VMware Server 2.0 - Server-side and web based technology development lead for VI (vCenter & ESX) 3.0, 3.1 & 4.0. VI 3.0 was the marquee industry defining VMware product consisting of ESX & vCenter pieces, at the core of the $8B franchise. Other prior titles: Member of Technical Staff III, II, I and MTS Intern
Grid Computing Research Associate
2005 - 2006
TACC is one of the premier national scale Research and Development labs dedicated to computing in general and High Performance "Grid" Computing in particular. Researched and produced innovative web based middleware applications for enabling High Perfomance Grid Computing. Developer on Grid Portal Toolkit that was supported by NSF's TeraGrid Project, DOE and NPACI Grid Portals Project.
Web Engineering Developer
2002 - 2004
Created the Engineering EXPO registration, management, billing and auditing system using MS SQL Server 2000 as the backend and Active Server Pages (ASP) front-end interface. UT-EXPO is the one of the largest student run career fairs in the country with nearly 200-300 employers participating and generating revenues greater than $ 1 Million
Web Engineering Developer
2002 - 2003
HMTF center was headed by Bank of America Centennial Fellow and Professor, Robert Parrino. Designed and developed a web based solution to manage and execute Texas Private Equity Conference since 2003.