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WASHINGTON, MARCH 09: Wireless whiz Mohan Gyani's appointment on Thursday as President and CEO of AT&T's Wireless Services unit barely caused a ripple in the Indian community or desi techdom. Why would it? Not a week passes in the United States now without an Indian-American making a splash in the new economy. And in the cutting edge world of telecom, communication, and networking, Indian are creating plenty of wow and flutter.

Consider this: In the last decade, Indians have founded at least a
dozen top-of-the-line networking and telecom companies in the US (see chart) worth more than $ 100 billion. Dozens of Indians head key units of blue chips like AT&T, Bell, Lucent, Cisco, and Qualcomm. In at least half a dozen cases, the Indians founders have sold their companies to giant conglomerates for fortunes in excess of $ 500 million.

Mohan Gyani's is a regulation Indian émigré success story. Born in India, Gyani, now 48, grew up in several countries before settling in San Francisco in 1970. After an MBA from San Francisco State University, he began his career in 1978 with Pacific Telesis Group where he held a number of financial
and operations positions.

Most recently (and famously), as executive vice president and CFO of AirTouch, Gyani was a key leader in the $120 billion merger of AirTouch and Vodafone and the subsequent $70 billion joint venture with Bell Atlantic. Prior to the merger, Industry watchers say Gyani played a major operational and strategic role in the company's growth from an IPO to a $70 billion global company in five years.

"His accomplishments include a highly successful large-scale IPO and profitable growth and business expansion, which have earned him an enviable reputation with Wall Street and shareholders,'' AT&T President John D. Zeglis said in announcing the appointment. AT&T plans to conduct an initial public offering of AT&T Wireless Group tracking shares this spring following a March 14 shareholder vote.

The enviable reputation Zeglis spoke of is something the telecom and networking industry seems to by and large credit Indians with. Last year, Qualcomm, the San Diego company that is a stock market rage, picked Indian Anil Kripalani as a senior vice-president. Cisco has Jayashree Ullal as one of its vice-presidents. Bell and Lucent have their share of Indian honchos.

But while Gyani and Kripalani are blazing a path in the corporate world, others are their own masters in the networking and telecom domain. Mukesh Chatter founded Nexabit Networks in 1996, developing networking technology that could transfer data 100 times faster than traditional methods. That led Lucent to bid $ 900 million for Nexabit, then the largest payment ever for a prerevenue company.

Then there is Raj Singh, who helped found Cerent and whose latest venture Stratumone, was acquired by Cisco systems last year for $435 million (Cisco bought Cerent for $ 6.9 billion).

Tachion, founded by Indian Satish M Sharma (not the politician) last year announced that it has developed what it calls a collapsed central office, an integrated communications system that can allow carriers to switch and transport both phone calls and different data formats in a fraction of the space required for traditional communications gear.

Qlogic, whose President and CEO is Indian H.K.Desai, is a leader in computer data storage and is bustling for primacy in fiber channel technology, a new industry-standard approach to high-speed data transfer between computers and separate data-storage disk drives.

Then of course, there is the now famous story of Sycamore -- first reported in these columns - the pioneer in optical networking whose founder Desh Deshpande has become something of a cult figure in Indian-American hightech world.

The increasing numbers and profile of Indians in cutting edge
technology areas in the US makes the continuing spat between India and the US over transfer of hightech rather anachronistic. The Indian government has succeeded in bringing about a coalition of Indian-Americans in other fields to lobby for India, but on the eve of President Clinton's visit to India and an upturn in Indo-US ties, networking with the network gurus is something that has only now begun to engage minds in New Delhi.

US Telecom and networking companies founded by Indians

• Juniper Networks: Co founder (with Scott Kriens) Pradeep Sindhu
  Market cap : $ 42 billion
  Provider of Internet infrastructure systems that are designed to meet the scalability, performance, density and compatibility requirements of rapidly evolving, optically-enabled IP networks
• Cerent (sold to Cisco): Co founders (with Carl Russo) Vinod Khosla
  and Ajaib Bhadare
  Cerent 454 network element enables service providers to customize bandwidth management
• Sycamore Networks: Founder and CEO Desh Deshpande
  Market Cap: $ 40 billion
  Developing networking products that are required to create a
  flexible, intelligent end-to-end optical network
• Exodus Communications: Founders K.B.Chandrashekhar and B.V.Jagadeesh
  Market cap: $ 27 billion
  Server hosting, Internet connectivity, collaborative systems
  management and Internet technology services
• Brocade Communication Systems: Co-founder (with Paul Bonderson) Kumar Malavalli
  Market cap: $ 17 billion
  Firm supplies open Fibre Channel Fabric solutions that provide the
  intelligent backbone for storage area networks
• Cobalt Networks: Co-Founder Vivek Mehra
  Market cap: $ 3.5 billion
  Company deals with workgroup microservers running on a Linux-based
  platform that provide Internet connectivity.
• 
  IntelliNet Technologies: Founder and CEO Anjan Ghosal
  Custom Intelligent Network related software development for the
  telecommunication Industry
• Accelerated Networks: Founder and CEO Suresh Nihalani
  Multi-service access platform (MSAP) that enables service providers
  to offer bundled services over a single access facility

Other stories of the series: