About GhangorCloud

Tarique Mustafa

Founder, CEO & CTO

Tarique is the Founder, CEO and the ‘Brain’ behind GhangorCloud’s game changing technology and product. He is recognized in the industry as the leading visionary and expert in Information Security, Advanced Persistent Threat and Data Leak Prevention. Tarique’s groundbreaking innovation in Advanced Persistent Threat and ‘Malicious Data Leak Prevention’ has won international recognition – he is frequently invited as Keynote / Guest Speaker at prestigious Security Conferences and Forums.

Most recently, Tarique was the founding CEO/CTO of nexTier Networks – a Silicon Valley company that has built “Best of the Breed” award winning Data Leak Prevention solution and technology.

Tarique has more than 20 years of industry experience in technical leadership positions at Symantec, DHL-Airways IT, MCI WorldCom, EDS, Andes Networks and Nevis Networks where he built industry leading security products. Previously, Tarique founded Network Utilities (a Silicon Valley startup that built wireless infrastructure & security platform) that was acquired by Andes Networks. Tarique also served as the CTO of Andes Networks, architects of an SSL Security Appliance and acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2003. Tarique also served as Principal Architect at Nevis Networks where he was responsible for building next generation Security Monitoring and Security Event Correlation technology for IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection/Prevention) and SSL/IPSec.

Tarique has several patents (approved and pending) with USPTO and has published many research publications in the areas of Information & Data Security, Computer & Network Security, Software Architecture, Database Technologies and Artificial Intelligence. Tarique was awarded the prestigious Rotary International Scholarship for his Doctoral Studies in Computer Science at University of Southern California (USC). Tarique also holds Master’s Degrees in Engineering and Computer Science from University of Southern California (USC), and a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from NED University of Engineering & Technology.

Bhanu Panda

Co-Founder, COO

Bhanu brings over two decades of leadership and success in the Silicon Valley, in areas of Networking, Security & Storage. He has held leadership positions, and was an early member, at several successful startup companies such as Array Networks, AlteonWebsystems and Auspex Systems. Bhanu has extensive experience in driving an organization’s overall strategy, building a global partner eco-system, and driving customer success.

At GhangorCloud, Bhanu holds the position of Chief Operating Officer and is a member of the Board. He is responsible for the overall business side: Strategy, Sales, Business Development, Customer Success and Operations.

Prior to GhangorCloud, Bhanu served as VP of Worldwide Sales, Business Development & Services for Array Networks. Bhanu revamped Global Sales efforts to deliver consistently superior results, leading to consecutive profitable quarters/years. Array had a successful IPO in 2009. He led the company into newer regions in APAC and established Array as a leader in its market category.

Previous to his time at Array, Bhanu was an early member and held management positions at AlteonWebsystems where he built and led the Customer Advocacy team as well as contributing significantly to BD activities. Alteon was recognized for its Customer Satisfaction and Services. Alteon had a hugely successful IPO followed by M&A with Nortel. Prior to Alteon, Panda managed the Customer Satisfaction organization at Auspex Systems, with Fortune-500 clientele.

Bhanu holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Jackson State University.

John Racioppi

EVP, Business Development

John brings to GhangroCloud over 30 years of leadership experience in the security, software, and networking arenas. He has driven strategy and direction for a number of organizations, most recently serving as CEO of Enhanced Communications Delivery Systems, a SaaS company focused on multi- channel messaging as a platform service. Prior to ECDS Mr. Racioppi served as General Manager, Data Leak Prevention Group, at Trend Micro as well as AVP, Enterprise Business Unit. Mr. Racioppi helped develop Trend’s strategy in DLP and served on the team which acquired Provilla, Inc. While at Trend he led the project team focused on long-term strategy and direction. John has extensive functional experience in strategic planning, product assessment and planning, go-to-market strategies, and revenue improvement.

John has been a leader in a variety of successful startup organizations as well as large public corporations including Trend Micro, Borland, IBM, AT&T and early stage companies including Infravio, Moonlight Systems, Lutris, and DASCOM. John also has experience in the consulting arena as part of Ernst & Young’s Telecommunications and Network consulting practice. John has led the strategy and planning activities of several global software vendors as they assessed new market opportunities. John received his MBA from the University of Pittsburgh.

John Metzler

Chief Systems Architect

John is a 30+ years veteran of Silicon Valley high-tech industry. He started his career in key technical positions with the pioneers of the high-tech industry such as 3-Com and Juniper where he developed the core foundational components of high performance Router Kernel and OS. More recently John has been in lead technical roles in multiple security companies including ArcSight-HP, PGP-Symantec, LogLogic, Netscreen-Juniper, Nevis Networks, nexTier Networks and Accellion.

Mixing abstract and production points of view, he has been involved in Data security, Data Communications, Custom Databases, Embedded Systems, Web Services, Platform Engineering, OS Internals and File Systems, Cryptography and Complex Event Processing. John has been a contributor to the software industry’s Open Source initiatives where he has made substantial contributions to the widely recognized Gnu-based software development and debugging platforms. John was a key member of the main GDB team at Cygnus. John holds a Bachellor’s Degree in Computer Science from University of California Irvine.

Shakuntala Addepalli

Vice President, Product Management (ISE)

Shakuntala is the Vice President of Product Management for GhangorCloud’s industry leading Cybersecurity product, Informtion Securtiy Enforcer (ISE™).

She has over 20 years of Silicon Valley Hi-tech experience in a wide range of engineering, and project management roles executing complex technical projects. Her professional specialties include Cybersecurity, WAN Optimization solutions, and Storage Networking. Her perseverance, go getter attitude, and being able to deal with ambiguity, have helped her effectively lead geographically dispersed, multi-disciplinary teams through her detail-focused planning, design and execution of large projects while achieving time sensitive milestones.

At GhangorCloud, Shakuntala spends her time creating requirements, roadmaps, managing resources, project schedules, for ISE product releases. Some of her initiatives include improvements in CI/CD pipeline, High availability, Containerization of ISE product, DevOps, Release management and Quality automation.

Prior to GhangorCloud, Shakuntala held senior manager roles at Symantec and Broadcom where she leveraged her professional expertise in Proxies, Cloud Web Security, and CASB. As a quality leader, Shakuntala defined cloud services and test strategies that seamlessly drove new and existing customer adoption of SaaS products based on cloud transformation journeys. Shakuntala started her career working as a principal engineer at Tacit Corporation acquired by Packeteer, responsible for quality assurance teams and as a senior quality manager at Blue Coat Systems directing quality teams for the PacketShaper and Blue Coat ProxySG product lines. Her strategic agility, decision quality and problem solving competencies helped deliver PacketShaper S-series product line which was the first 10Gbps full-duplex multi-core software design with full application classification and QoS control. This new product line contributed significantly to revenue, and had a high conversion rate to replace the legacy PSOS systems.

Shakuntala holds an MS in Software Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani.

Wasim Azhar

Chief Software Architect

Wasim is currently the Chief Software Architect for GhangorCloud’s industry leading Information Security Enforcer (ISE™). With more than 20 years of industry experience in full stack applications, network protocols, messaging infrastructure and system integration, Wasim oversees design and development of core infrastructure for GhangorCloud’s (ISETM) product.

Wasim is an accomplished software engineer with demonstrated experience developing highly scalable enterprise systems and web applications in cybersecurity, data protection, and networking including ultra-high-use transaction processing systems of large global banks.

Prior to GhangorCloud, Wasim served as a senior software and solutions engineer at GMBH Dubai, where he developed solutions for document emulation engines, document generation, and systems for large-scale content management integrated with hundreds of third-party systems deployed globally. Wasim played key role in developing large-scale immigration systems for the UAE government at Emaratech, FZ LLC, and customized third-party financial applications for high-scale transaction processing at the Bank of Abu Dhabi.

Prior to his professional experiences in Dubai, UAE, Wasim served as a principal software engineer for Cambridge Docs, Pvt. Ltd in Pakistan and started his career as a software engineer at ESP Ltd, in Pakistan developing peer-to-peer file sharing systems and enterprise data-sharing systems in high-scale environments. Wasim holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from IQRA University, Pakistan and a Bachelor’s Degree in Business and Commerce at the University of the Punjab, Pakistan.

Tim Mather

Advisory Board

Tim Mather is a long-time Information Security practitioner, who has served in executive roles as CSO of Cadence, Advisory Director Information Protection at KPMG, VP & Chief Security Strategist at RSA Security, VP & CISO at Symantec, Security Manager at Verisign, and Manager Information Security at Apple. Tim is a Board Member of the Silicon Valley Chapter of the Cloud Security Alliance.

Tim has co-authored two books on information security: “Cloud Security and Privacy: an Enterprise Perspective on Risks & Compliance” (O’Riely) and “The Executive Guide to Information Security: Threats, Challenges and Solutions” (Addison-Wesley). Tim is a CISSP, CISA and CISM. He holds Master’s Degrees in Information Assurance form Brandeis University, National Security Studies from Georgetown University, and International Policy Studies from Monterey Institute of International Studies. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Mike Rogers

Advisory Board

Mike is a Strategy, Corporate and Business Development expert with a 25+ year background in Banking, Digital Media and Cybersecurity. Mike is a veteran consultant to early stage companies, having formed and built two management consulting practices in Silicon Valley, after successful Executive Strategy, Corporate and Business Development roles at OpenTV, Cyberguard, Secure Computing, and Lumension Security. Mike has a BA in Economics from the University of Michigan, and an MBA in International Finance from Thunderbird.

Levent Arabaci

Advisory Board

Mr. Arabaci has over 30 years of experience in leadership and transformation and spent last 17 years of his career at Hitachi Ltd. and held leadership positions in multiple functions. At Hitachi, Mr. Arabaci held the Chief Transformation Officer (CTrO) Global Operations and GM of Human Capital Group at Hitachi Ltd. Mr. Arabaci was also a member of the Board of Directors in Hitachi America Ltd. (HAL). Mr. Arabaci was responsible for driving and executing the transformation across HR, Finance, IT, Procurement, and Facilities and is tasked with creating best-in-class operations across the enterprise.

During his tenure at Hitachi, Mr. Arabaci had a successful career and notable accomplishments. Hitachi Vantara was recognized as the best place to work in 2009, 2010, and 2012. In addition, Vantara was listed on the Fortune 100 “Best Companies to Work For” in 2012 and was recognized as the top 40 “Best Companies for Leaders” in 2012. Mr. Arabaci was asked to lead the global HR transformation for the entire Hitachi in April 2012. He has developed and executed a global HR strategy supported by the Workday end-to-end (Human Capital Management) HCM platform for over 250,000 employee base. These initiatives resulted in $500M in savings to Hitachi while creating an accountability and growth mindset culture where every employee has an equal opportunity to unleash their full potential.

Later, Mr. Arabaci was assigned to lead Hitachi’s transformation for entire back-office functions in 2019 as the Chief Transformation Officer. In this capacity, Mr. Arabaci has launched the first Global Expense Management and Global Business Services (GBS) platform and identified multiple mission-critical projects across all functions to achieve $750M savings to prepare Hitachi for the next 100 years.

Before Hitachi Ltd., Mr. Arabaci held senior-level positions at Hitachi America Ltd., Hitachi Vantara, Cisco Systems Inc., Nestle, and Pepsi Co. in various functions such as operations, finance, internal audit, and primarily human resources. Mr. Arabaci holds a master’s degree in general management from the University of Istanbul, and an MBA in Marketing from the California State University, San Bernardino. He is a member of various advisory boards and earned awards and recognition for the work he has produced in various positions during his career.

William Stewart

Advisory Board

Bill Stewart, currently serves as a consultant, board member and technical advisor focused on the development of cyber security products and solutions. He has over 30 years of experience leading businesses that manage and mitigate cyber risk. His previous experience includes Senior Vice President of Strategy for Mandiant, responsible for developing new offerings and relationships to accelerate business growth. Bill also held several other senior corporate positions including Executive Vice President for Booz Allen Hamilton and Chubb Insurance.

As an EVP for Booz Allen Hamilton, he led the Commercial Cyber Security Business. In this role he led teams that developed strategy, provided consulting, and implemented solutions for today’s most complex cyber security problems. Mr. Stewart also led Booz Allen’s commercial financial services business and led several large cyber businesses for intelligence community clients in the national security market.

In his position as Division President of Chubb’s Global Cyber Risk Practice, Mr. Stewart was responsible for the development and implementation of Chubb’s strategy to deliver the full suite of property and casualty cyber insurance offerings worldwide. This included Chubb’s risk transfer, loss mitigation and incident response services, all designed to mitigate the rapidly evolving threats faced by businesses of all sizes as well as individuals.

Mr. Stewart is an experienced business developer and leader, having grown several large businesses in both the public and private sectors. He maintains deep client relationships in multiple industries including: Financial Services; Retail; Energy; High Tech Manufacturing and Health Care as well as the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence Community.

As an experienced strategist and leader, Mr. Stewart created enhanced security best practice for public and private sector clients. For example, he worked to develop public key and privilege management technology that now forms the basis of much of today’s industry best practice in the discipline.

Mr. Stewart also worked for a major electronics firm where he developed communications security and key management devices. He also served as a Signal Officer, Battalion Commander, Brigade/Battalion S-3, and Company Commander in the US Army.

He holds an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Drexel University and a B.S. degree in engineering from Widener University.

Sam Philips

Advisory Board

Senior Technology Executive with extensive experience in establishing, consulting and growing technology, security and risk programs in large international corporations as well as medium and small sized companies. Experience includes establishing and developing business requirements, creating and implementing governance and architecture models, infrastructure development, process development management, and executing critical processes, products, and services with a strong focus on security, quality and availability.

Vas Kodali

Advisory Board

Vas Kodali is a highly seasoned executive with extensive experience in technology, management consulting and financial services. With a career spanning over three decades, he has held key leadership positions at prominent global institutions, driving top-line growth, building new capabilities, developing strategic partnerships and enabling operational efficiencies.

Vas started his career at IBM, where he was instrumental in designing and developing one of the first artificial intelligence systems for the financial services, healthcare and retail industries. This program ultimately led to the launch of IBM Watson technologies.   

Over the past ten years, Kodali served as Executive Vice President and Head of Strategic Partnerships and Accelerator Investments at Wells Fargo Corporation. In this role, he cultivated strong relationships with Tier 1 venture capital/growth equity firms and technology companies to identify key emerging capabilities valued by business line leadership and subsequently facilitating direct investments. Vas also played a pivotal role in driving technology investment banking deal generation in the M&A advisory and equity areas. His expertise led him to become a board member of the Carolina Fintech Hub and Duke University’s FinTech program. 

Prior to his tenure at Wells Fargo, Kodali held various leadership roles at Bank of America. Notably, as a senior executive in Corporate Strategy, he was selected to serve the CEO & Operating Committee, where he spearheaded initiatives to drive top-line growth and operating efficiencies for technology infrastructure, FICC trading and technology investment banking businesses.  

Before his corporate roles in the financial services industry, Kodali honed his strategic acumen as a Partner at A.T. Kearney, Inc., where he led management consulting engagements in financial services and information technology. His diverse portfolio included designing and implementing innovative business and operating models, developing ePayments strategies, and spearheading large-scale productivity efforts for major financial services and technology companies.  

Vas received an MBA from UCLA, an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University with an emphasis on Artificial Intelligence & Computer Architecture, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University.  He has been a frequent participant at the Executive CTO Forum at Harvard Business School and the Executive Innovation Program at Singularity University