Industry Veteran

Life

has come a full circle for Krish Prabhu who started his career in research,

moved on to managerial roles, and is now nurturing startups as a venture partner

at Morgenthaler where he focuses primarily on telecommunications investment.

Prabhu did his MSc in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai

in 1975. There has been no looking back for him. Prabhu landed in the US in 1975

with $25. He completed his MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the

University of Pittsburgh in 1977 and 1980 respectively. He joined Alcatel in

1984 in the US when Alcatel acquired Rockwell International’s

telecommunications business. He served as V-P, business development and CTO at

Rockwell’s network transmission systems division. Prior to Rockwell, Prabhu

served as a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories, New Jersey where he

worked on digital encoding technologies.

Prior to becoming COO of Alcatel and CEO of Alcatel USA, he held a number of

executive positions within the US and Europe. As COO of Alcatel, he managed the

launch of its worldwide DSL products and was instrumental in selling them to US

service providers. As CEO of Alcatel US, he drove the launch of its cross

connect products in key accounts such as AT&T and WorldCom. All this lead to

increasing the US sales from $1 billion in 1997 to $7 billion in 2001. He was

responsible for the acquisition and integration of several companies including

DSC and Newbridge and was instrumental in transitioning Alcatel to a leading

global networking company.

A recognized expert and veteran of the telecommunications industry, Prabhu

has a rich experience of more than 20 years. At present, he is on board of a

large number of companies like Alcatel, Symmetricom, Cenix, Catena Networks,

Phoutrix, Yotta Networks, Westwav Communications, Navini Networks, Axes

Technologies, ECI Telecom, and Ittiam Systems. He has also served as an adjunct

professor for telecommunications at the University of Texas at Dallas and taught

at University of Texas at Arlington. Prabhu is also a senior member of

IEEE. n