Dr. Inder Gopal is Chairman and Board Member for Niral Networks. He is currently a visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, working on behalf of the Government of India’s Smart City Mission to launch a nationwide Urban Data platform. He was previously Vice President of Software at Ericsson, where he was instrumental in launching their Edge computing efforts. Before that, he was Vice President of Networking at IBM, where he had responsibility for all of IBM’s hardware and software networking products. He has also worked in senior executive roles at AT&T and Prodigy. He has also founded, built-up, and successfully sold two venture-funded start-up companies, ReefEdge and Iptivia, both viewed as pioneering innovators in their space. He served as the Founding Chairman of a leading open source networking software group, OpenDaylight (ODL), recruiting dozens of top-tier companies to participate.
Dr. Gopal has also had a distinguished research career in the area of computer networks, with 20 patents and more than 70 technical publications to his credit. He worked at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, earning two IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards. He has served as editor of several technical journals and was elected Fellow of the IEEE. He has a PhD from Columbia University, New York and a BA from Oxford University, England.