Dheeraj is the Founder, CEO & Chairman of Nutanix. He brings a wealth of experience of working at high growth enterprise software companies. Prior to founding Nutanix, Dheeraj was the VP of Engineering at Aster Data (now Teradata), where he helped build the product and its engineering team from the ground up. At Oracle, he managed the storage engine group for Oracle Database/Exadata, and co-authored numerous patents in the area of distributed databases. Dheeraj’s entrepreneurial spirit has been recognized with a number of prestigious awards including Dell’s Founders 50 and the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year, Silicon Valley. Dheeraj is a Ph.D. dropout from University of Texas (Austin), where he was a Graduate Fellow of Computer Science. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Kanpur), where he was adjudged the “Best All-Rounder Student Among All Graduating Students in All Disciplines” and bestowed with the Distinguished Alumnus Award.