Mr. Deepak Vasant Vaidya, popularly known as Dee Vaidya, is the Chairman of the Board of NobleTek, a technology company involved in Engineering Services and Product Lifecycle Management. He also serves as the President of RDM Equipment Co. in Wooster, Ohio, that distributes equipment and spare parts to firms drilling for Oil and Gas. The company has recently got into business of equipments for the ultra-filtration of water.
He started his career, working at his father’s rubber products company for three years in India and returned to Akron, where he had pursued his Master’s degree, in the beginning of 1979. In 1983 he moved to Austin, Texas and switched to a career in the computer industry. His biggest customer was Michael Dell for whom he built PCs in huge numbers, every day.
In 1993 Mr. Vaidya started TechniGraphics, Inc., along with his wife Mary, with just $5,000 and a dream. He acquired the TGS Technology division of Johnson Control in Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1994, which was a federal contractor for Geospatial Intelligence Systems (GIS). The company produced digital maps for the U.S. Government. In January 2003, TechniGraphics won a $200 million Global Geospatial Intelligence (GGI) Prime Contract from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The rapid growth of the company put TechniGraphics on Inc. magazine’s list of the 500 fastest growing American companies in September 2006. Subsequently, Mr. Vaidya sold TechniGraphics, with over 400 employees, to CACI in November 2010 and acquired RDM Equipment Co. in May 2012.
A graduate in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mr. Vaidya holds a Master’s Degree in Polymer Science from the University of Akron, Ohio and a Master’s Degree in Industrial Administration (1976) from Purdue University. “I had wonderful time on IIT Bombay campus, where bright young people from all over India, excelling in music, arts, public speaking and so on, came together at one place. This exposure to high level of intelligence and talent, allowed me to also become a well rounded person, something I would not have been otherwise,” he recalled. As a mark of gratitude and affection for his alma mater, Mr. Vaidya announced a $100,000 gift for IIT Bombay to launch the ‘TechniGraphicS Lecture Series’, during the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the Institute in New York City, in the year 2008. The Former President of Mexico, Mr. Vicente Fox was the latest speaker to deliver a TechniGraphicS Lecture at IIT Bombay.
In January 2013, Mr. Vaidya was elected Chairman of the Board of the Wooster Area Chamber of Commerce, for a one-year term. Upon his retirement in January 2014, at the Chamber’s Annual Dinner, Mr. Vaidya was presented with a flag of the United States of America that was flown over the United States Capitol in his honour, at the request of Ohio Congressman Mr. Jim Renacci.
Mr. Vaidya’s hobbies include listening to jazz, reading spy and special forces novels and traveling. In 2012, he turned vegan after reading a book ‘Prevent and reverse heart disease’