Steve Mullaney

Chief Executive Officer

Steve Mullaney has 25 years of marketing, product management, and engineering experience in network infrastructure and security. Prior to Nicira, Steve held executive positions at Palo Alto Networks, Blue Coat, Force10, Cisco, Growth Networks, ShoreTel, Bay Networks and SynOptics. Before SynOptics, he was a design engineer at GTE Government Systems. Steve holds a BSEE from University of Rhode Island.

Martin Casado

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer

Martin Casado received his PhD from Stanford University in 2007 where his dissertation work led to the technology on which Nicira is based. He received his Masters from Stanford University in 2005. While at Stanford, Martin co-founded Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company, which was acquired by Quova Inc. in 2006. Prior to attending Stanford, Martin held a research position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked on network security in the information operations assurance center (IOAC).

Keith Amidon

Director, Engineering

Keith Amidon has 16 years of experience in network infrastructure and security products. Prior to joining Nicira, Keith was Director of Embedded Development at McAfee Inc. He joined McAfee via the acquisition of IntruVert Networks, of which he was a cofounder in 2000. IntruVert led the transition from Intrusion Detection Systems to Intrusion Prevention Systems with reliable wire-speed appliance products performing layer-7 signature analysis and responding to threats in real-time.

Paul Fazzone

Vice President, Product Management

Paul Fazzone has over 13 years of experience with data center and virtualization networking products.  He currently drives Nicira's product management and marketing efforts. Prior to joining Nicira, Paul was the Director of Product Management at Cisco responsible for the Nexus data center access and virtualization switching products and strategy including the Nexus 1000V.  Paul holds a BA in computer science from Saint Anselm College.

John Jendricks

Vice President, Business Development & Operations

John Jendricks is responsible for Nicira's business operations following similar positions over several decades at Adobe, Wellfleet, StrataCom, Cisco, Juniper and Force10. He graduated from California Polytechnic University.

Nick McKeown

Co-Founder

Nick McKeown is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and Faculty Director of the Stanford Clean Slate Design Program. He received his bachelor's degree from Leeds University (1986), his MS (1992) and PhD (1995) from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1986-1989 he worked for Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bristol, England. In 1995, he helped architect Cisco's GSR 12000 router. In 1997 Nick co-founded Abrizio Inc. (acquired by PMC-Sierra), where he was CTO. He was co-founder and CEO of Nemo ("Network Memory") , which is now part of Cisco. Nick is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), the IEEE and the ACM. In 2005, he was awarded the British Computer Society Lovelace Medal, and in 2009 the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award.

Scott Shenker

Co-Founder and Chief Scientist

Scott Shenker is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his bachelor's degree from Brown University (1978), his PhD (1983) in theoretical physics from the University of Chicago, and spent a postdoctoral year at Cornell University. He became a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC in 1984, left to found and direct the AT&T Center for Internet Research at ICSI in 1999, and then joined the U. C. Berkeley faculty in 2004. Scott was awarded the ACM SIGCOMM award in 2002, the IEEE Internet Award in 2006, and an honorary doctorate by the University of Chicago in 2007. In terms of commercial experience, Scott has worked closely with AT&T and has been a consultant with Cisco.