Sundar Iyer (PhD/MS Stanford Univ. '08/'00, B. Tech IIT Bombay '98) is co-founder and head of Candid Systems (a Cisco Alpha Company). Candid (acquired by Cisco in Sep 2017) pioneered the Cisco Network Assurance Engine, a closed loop SDN based software solution built with formal mathematicals models of Data Center networks. Previously, he was co-founder and CEO of Memoir Systems. Memoir (acquired by Cisco Systems in '14) pioneered Algorithmic Memory, to enable 10X Memory Operations Per Second on embedded memory. In the fall of '03, Sundar co-founded Nemo Systems, where he was the CTO and Principal Architect. Nemo aka. "Network Memory" (acquired by Cisco Systems in '05), specialized in caching algorithms for high-performance networking, developed by Sundar during his Ph.D. at Stanford. From fall '05 to '08, he co-led the Network Memory group at Cisco Systems, where he helped architect and build multiple generations of high performance memory sub-systems for Cisco's Enterprise and Data Center Ethernet products.

In 1999, Sundar was a founding engineer and senior systems architect at SwitchOn Networks (acquired by PMC-Sierra in 2000), where he developed algorithms (some of which were conceptualized during his B.Tech thesis at IIT Bombay) for deep packet classification. <br><br>

He is a recipient of the Christopher Stephenson best Master's thesis award in 2000, and the Arthur L. Samuel best doctoral thesis award in 2008, both in Computer Science at Stanford. In 2008, he was awarded the MIT technology review (TR35) young innovator award for his work on network memory, and the IIT Bombay Young Alumni Achiever Award in 2014. <br><br>

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