Mr. Ajit C. Shelat has completed his B.Tech., in Electrical Engineering in 1977 and M.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Bombay in 1980. After a few years as Computer Maintenance Engineer at IIT Bombay, Mr. Shelat joined the Electronic Business Equipment Division of Godrej and Boyce Manufacturing Company in 1982 as a Senior Development Officer and went on to hold various key positions later.

During his tenure as Manager of R&D for the Symphony family of workstations, the Symphony B, C and D workstations based on MC68020 and MC68030 processors as well as the Symphony 860 workstation based on the 64-bit inter processor i80860 were brought out. As Business Manager of the Networking Products Group, Mr. Shelat’s efforts resulted in successful development of networking products such as terminal servers, x-windows emulation package for PCs and a TCP/IP package for PCs.

Mr. Shelat set up Rimo Technologies Pvt. Ltd. in 1995 which was focused on services in the area of networking software and systems, which later teamed up with SwitchOn Networks in Milpitas, CA, USA. Mr. Shelat became a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of SwitchOn Networking India. His team came out with a product idea for developing a high performance packet classification engine, which was revolutionary. Mr. Shelat and his group have five patents with USA on packet classification.

SwitchOn was acquired by PMC-Sierra, a leading communication and networking chip company, for $ 450 million in November 2000. This was big news in the computer industry and hailed as one of the largest takeovers in the country.

Mr. Shelat has continued his close association with IIT Bombay.