Balakrishnan Thoppaswamy

Experience

1. Senior Director, Software Development

   Cisco

   Jan 2010 — Present · Bengaluru, IN

   For past 7 years, I am leading the Cisco UCS team focused on building new generation of UCS servers which has seen unprecedented growth since its launch in 2009. Platform SW Engineering Lead for Cisco UCS C-Series (Rack Mount), S-Series (Dense Storage servers) & Cisco M-series (Dense compute).For first few years, I led the firmware team in building capabilities in firmware of UCS servers to drive policy based management with primary focus on rack mount servers (C-Series) and then took on a broader role of Platform SW Engineering leader.Beginning 2012, as Platform SW Engineering lead, managed projects and teams through a number of major SW and HW releases. Driven projects from Concept phase to FCS to Sustenance phases. HW Projects: M1, M2, M3, M4 generations of C220, C240, C22, C24; Cisco UCS Storage Server S3260, Cisco UCS M-Series. SW Projects: Developing C series FW from basic feature set to industry standard and additional innovative features for easy deployment and remote management and scalability (IO Adapter Management, Fault Monitoring, Node Management, Boot Manager, IPMI, BIOS Policies, etc). Developed features that enabled virtualization of very low platform attributes such as boot policy, BIOS tokens, UUID, power policies etc enabling deeper virtualization advantage to Cisco UCS server through Out of Band management.Being one of the early UCS engineering team member at India, played a major role in growing the team from 10 to 120 team members and drove various software and product release ownership.Drove various initiatives to improve quality of UCS servers which posed major challenges as the business was scaling up. Handled customer escalations with major customers such as Amex, JP Morgan, LinkedIn etc. Managed the multinational partner and vendor relationship with Taiwan ODMs, AMI, Intel, Broadcom, Emulex, Qlogic etc. Streamlined build & release activities and automation development resulting in improved quality and productivity.

Education

• San José State University

  Master’s Degree, Software Engineering

  2006 — 2008

Skills

• Embedded Software
• Embedded Systems
• Hardware
• X86
• Fibre Channel
• C
• Processors
• Firmware
• Embedded Linux
• Device Drivers
• Rtos
• Kernel
• Computer Architecture
• Linux
• Linux Kernel
• Servers
• Debugging
• Bios