Mr. Shridhar Bhalchandra Shukla is currently the Chairman of the Board, KPOINT Technologies. After receiving his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering (EE) from IIT Bombay, he went on to receive his MS in EE from Virginia Tech., USA, in 1985, and his PhD in ECE from North Carolina State University, USA, in 1990, with a dissertation on parallel processing applied to artificial vision.
Mr. Shukla’s experience spans a broad spectrum – from teaching and research in academia to commercial technology development, corporate leadership, and entrepreneurship.
Mr. Shukla is the Chairman of the Board of KPOINT Technologies which he co-founded in 2011. KPOINT is a patented video engagement SaaS platform – built from scratch – for businesses and it is deployed globally for millions of users. KPOINT was incubated at GS Lab, which he co-founded in 2003. GS Lab builds infrastructure products for global software OEMs working in cloud, communications, and security infrastructure. It was acquired in 2021 when it had 1700 employees and had the world’s leading technology companies as customers in cloud infrastructure, communications, and application security.
Before founding GS Lab, he served as a full-time Director and Chief Operating Officer at Persistent Systems for nine years during its early growth years. He developed the company into a leader in outsourced product development, shipping its initial products, building its identity management business from scratch, and setting up the organization for scale.
He began his career as a Computer Engineering faculty member at the Naval Postgraduate School, in California. He initiated and distributed computing research projects funded by the NSF, US Navy, and Unisys. He has advised more than 20 Masters and PhD students and published over 25 papers in parallel processing, distributed computing, multicast routing, and directory services.
He also initiated the establishment of IIT Bombay Trust Lab as a Founder-Donor for developing the science, technology, and ecosystem for trust in the digital world. He works with three educational foundations and supports one start-up to bring technology and processes for the professional development and enhancement of India’s school teachers at no charge. He has received several awards and accolades over the years.
At the Naval Postgraduate School, he received the Best Paper Award, International Parallel Processing Conference, Chicago, 1992; the NSF Research Initiation Award, 1993, for developing group membership protocols; and the IITB Distinguished Service Award, 2007.
While he was at Persistent, the company received the CSI Award for Best Shrink-wrapped Software Product for PS EnList, 1998.
During his tenure at GS Lab, the company received the Pune Best Employer Brand Awards 2017 by Employer Branding Institute India; the Best Healthcare Leadership in Pune, 2018; the Working Mother Avatar 100 Best Companies for Women 2017, 2018, 2020 & 2021; was amongst the Top 5 companies across industries in two categories – Excellence in Digital HR and Connected Organization by Mercer NDTV Excellence Awards 2017; the ABP News and World HRD Conference Awards 2019-20; and the Equal Opportunity Enabler and CSR by Assocham and CMR, Mar 2020.
KPOINT was a Winner of the Microsoft BizSpark- India Startup 20 Challenge, 2013; Winner of the Golden Bridge Award, 2013; won the Global eLearning Award for Learning Technology Solution, 2013; Microsoft Code for Honor, Excellence Award, 2014; the Brandon Hall Group Excellence in Technology Award, 2015; and was the Western Region Winner, IBM GEP India SmartCamp, 2015.
Hobbies: “Playing tennis, meeting people, listening to podcasts/ books.”
Any other interesting fact about yourself that you may like to share: “My most rewarding business breaks materialized years later and came from two chance meetings I had with complete strangers on a single afternoon in 1994.”