Board of Directors
Flint Brenton – President and CEO of AccelOps
Dr. Partha Bhattacharya – CTO, Vice President of Engineering and Founder of AccelOps
Chris Rust – Partner at U.S. Venture Partners
Heiner Sussner – Managing Director at Miramar Venture Partners
Robert Thomas – President and Chief Executive Officer of Infoblox
Hsun K. Chou – CEO and Founder of EICO INC.
Flint Brenton – President and CEO
As AccelOps President and CEO, Flint Brenton leads AccelOps’ business strategy and operations.
Flint is a proven IT operations management software veteran. He most recently served as senior vice president of engineering in Cisco’s Intelligent Automation Business Unit. In this role, he led the organization in delivering automation solutions that make it easier for IT to manage and administer diverse technologies. In 2009, as president and CEO of Tidal Software, he oversaw the company’s acquisition by Cisco. He then guided the integration of the Tidal business into Cisco and the creation of the Intelligent Automation business unit.
During his 25-year career, Flint also served as senior vice president and general manager of NetIQ’s Security and Administration business unit, and has held various leadership positions at NetIQ, Compaq Computer Corporation, BMC Software and IBM.
He received a master’s in business and public management from Rice University and a bachelor of science degree from Mount Union College.
Dr. Partha Bhattacharya – Co-Founder, CTO and VP of Engineering
Dr. Partha Bhattacharya is co-founder, chief technology officer and vice president of engineering at AccelOps.
He has more than 18 years of experience in networking, security, database, system architecture and software development. Before AccelOps, he founded Protego Networks, where as CTO he created the award-winning MARS security appliance product line. Following Protego’s acquisition by Cisco Systems, he led the Cisco team that extended the product’s capabilities to satisfy a global market.
Before Protego, Partha was architect and technical lead at Cisco in charge of implementing the company’s security management infrastructure in the PIX, IOS, firewall, VPN, router and IDS products. Before Cisco, he was a research scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he directed numerous network QoS, security, system scheduling and parallel query designs. While at IBM, he designed the company’s implementation of the IETF Service Location Protocol and built the industry’s first IR wireless LAN access point with token ring.
Partha holds 15 patents and is the recipient of two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards and a fellowship from the University of Maryland Systems Research Center. He holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland.
Chris Rust – Partner at U.S. Venture Partners
Chris Rust is a partner at U.S. Venture Partners. His areas of interest include enterprise/data center infrastructure, cloud, mobile and consumer. He currently serves on the board of directors or is an active board observer on Akros Silicon, Clustrix, GoPro, Kaiam, PlumGrid and Zerto. His past investments and board seats include Abrizio, Avanex, Commerce5, Mellanox, Santur, and VxTel. Chris gravitates to investments pursuing high-growth potential that can yield large businesses of enduring value. He invests in the passion of the founders, and believes the best CEOs are often first-time Founder-CEOs from humble beginnings.
Over his career as an investor and entrepreneur, Chris has helped define, build and bring many market-leading products and services to market. From 2001 to 2004, he was the CEO of Mahi Networks (Meriton). From 1998 to 2002, he was a partner at Sequoia Capital. From 1984 to 1998, Chris held a variety of engineering and product management roles in the networking and communication fields. He also spent four years as a member of technical staff designing military communications systems at MITRE, and started his career as an electrical engineer at Nokia in Espoo, Finland.
Chris received a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Lowell, an M.S. in telecommunications engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an M.S. in engineering management from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was a founding member of the Cable Labs DOCSIS cable modem standards effort, and holds issued patents related to broadband communications, home gateways and set top box design.
Heiner Sussner – Managing Director at Miramar Venture Partners
Heiner Sussner is managing director at Miramar Venture Partners, where he focuses on storage and cloud-related investments. In addition to AccelOps, he is a director of Fastsoft, IMT, Jeda Networks and Matrix Sensors, and previously served on the board of Azuro (acquired by Cadence), Protego Networks (acquired by Cisco) and SiliconSystems (acquired by Western Digital).
Before joining Miramar, he was a senior managing director of H&Q; Asia Pacific, where he was responsible for technology investments in Asia and Silicon Valley and served on the boards of several technology start-ups, including Headway Technology (acquired by TDK in 2000).
Heiner started his professional career at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Physics in Stuttgart and joined IBM Research in San Jose, Calif., in 1980, working on advanced recording technology. In 1986, he became director of storage systems and technology for IBM Research and in 1992 joined IBM Europe in Paris, where he became co-founder and director of IBM Europe’s corporate venture group.
Heiner is a graduate of the Technical University of Munich and received his Ph.D. in physics in 1976 for his work at the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique in Grenoble, France, and the University of Konstanz, Germany. He is author of numerous scientific publications, holds several patents and was awarded the 1994 IEEE Medal for Engineering Excellence.
Robert Thomas – President and Chief Executive Officer of Infoblox
Robert Thomas brings more than 30 years of technical, sales, marketing and management experience in the technology industry. In his current role as president and CEO of Infoblox, he has built the company into a highly profitable and valued business and successfully took it public in May 2012 (Nasdaq: BLOX). Previously, he was CEO and president at NetScreen Technologies, which was acquired by Juniper Networks; and he held senior management positions at Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu and ICL.
During his nine years at Sun Microsystems, he was general manager of intercontinental operations and director of international marketing development, overseeing Sun’s international business opportunities and policies.
Robert holds a B.Sc. in mathematics from Adelaide University in Australia.
Hsun K. Chou – CEO and founder of EICO INC.
Dr. Hsun K. Chou is founder and CEO of EICO, Inc., a back-end service company for the semiconductor industry. He formerly served as director of operations of Toshiba Semiconductor USA, in charge of two wafer fabrication facilities. He is also a seasoned angel investor who supported a broad range of high-tech companies from the early stages, including NetScreen Technologies Inc. (IPO and then acquired by Juniper Networks) and Protego Networks, Inc. (acquired by Cisco Systems).
He received both a B.S. and M.S. from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and a Ph.D from The University of Tokyo.