November - 2003 issue > On The Cover

By Karthik Sundaram

SEEMS THE RULE OF THUMB IN naming your next wireless LAN startup is to be inspired by an exotic island or retreat: Tahoe, Shasta, Meru, Aruba...the last one, claim founders Pankaj Manglik and Keerti Melkote, was chosen by some judicious elimination: the name had to start with an "A", had to be a single word, easily rolled off the tongue, and one that would stick. It looks like Aruba was a good choice.

Recently, the venture capital world pumped $20 million into the San Jose, CA-based startup, signaling sound confidence in Aruba's technology and future roadmap-a sentiment not seen often in the entrepreneurial world of recent times. "We were considered 'hot' even before we began," recalls Manglik, "simply because we were two EIRs at Matrix Partners who had agreed not to speak to any other VC."

Manglik and Melkote met at Intel where they ran the internal network operations together-living through the Web wave and users clamoring for HTTP access. "In many respects, Wi-Fi is another unstoppable wave driven by user demand upward and vendor push downwards," says Manglik. He left Intel for Wharton and after graduating in 1997, made his way back to the Valley to join Cisco's Stratacom arm. Good friend Melkote partnered a long stint at Cisco within their successful Catalyst group. But when the bubble began to blow, both went their ways to different startups-Manglik to Alteon Web Systems and Melkote to Shasta Networks. Despite the separation both were convinced of their collective ability to come up with good and truly valuable ideas-some of which they saw others build into viable businesses that would one day pay off.

Ultimately it did. Post 9/11, Manglik, then an executive at Alteon, was convinced that the market wasn't going anywhere. "For the next two years, it was obvious to me that the only business to be in was in building, not selling products" recalls the Aruba CEO. Melkote quit Tahoe Networks "since 3G wasn't going anywhere and I was getting restless" and convinced Manglik to team up with him "because life is too short, and we can always find a job if we don't manage to start a company."

Committing to spend the next six months in coming up with the "next big idea," Manglik and Melkote traversed the market trends for inspiration. Two things were undeniable: security and wireless. The question was could they be combined into a compelling product to address the serious problems corporations were willing to pay big bucks to solve.

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