Leadership

OakGate Technology was founded by an experienced team of engineering professionals passionate about storage and the challenges that face companies in the design and deployment of storage products. OakGate has assembled a strong senior Executive Team of seasoned veterans with outstanding backgrounds from major industry leaders and successful start-ups. Its Board of Directors include OakGate executives and top-performing, former executives from world-class storage companies.

Executive Team

Anil Gupta

President and CEO

Anil Gupta serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of OakGate. He provides the vision, as well as the operational and business leadership for the company. Anil has spent more than thirty years in the technology business. He has built start-up businesses, as well as provided leadership to large technology organizations worldwide. Most recently, Anil was the key senior executive for Emulex in Asia, where he oversaw engineering development and customer engagements. He was also responsible for a significant portion of Emulex’s engineering worldwide including five locations in the US. Prior to his tenure at Emulex, Anil was CEO at Aristos Logic, a leading provider of RAID devices and software to customers, such as IBM and Apple. Anil worked at Western Digital for over thirteen years and was the VP responsible for worldwide ASIC and enterprise firmware engineering. Anil started his career at Intel, where he developed processor designs.

Bob Weisickle

Strategy & Technology Officer, Co-founder

Bob Weisickle co-founded OakGate Technology and serves as its Strategy & Technology Officer. In this role, Bob plays a pivotal role in strategic customer engagements and technology leadership initiatives. Bob has had a distinguished career in storage and server industries, holding key positions at large corporations, as well start-up companies. During his 26-year tenure at Hewlett Packard, Bob held a variety of positions, including the head of its Enterprise Storage Lab. Bob also played leadership roles in the engineering organizations at Sun Microsystems/Oracle, Network Appliance, Intransa, and Rackable Systems. He has extensive experience managing large engineering teams and offshore development facilities. Bob has engineering degrees from Santa Clara University.

Aaron Masters

VP of Engineering

Aaron Masters heads up the engineering team at OakGate Technology. He started his career in Hewlett Packard’s Measurement & Control group and held several positions at HP including Project Manager for networking ASICs and manufacturing engineering. Following the spin-off of Agilent Technologies, Aaron spent the next several years as Section Manager/Director for Tachyon Fibre Channel devices where he oversaw development of multiple generations of silicon products that dominated the industry. He has been with OakGate since the year of its founding. Aaron holds an engineering degree from Montana State University, Bozeman.

Vipul Mehta

VP of Marketing and Business Development

Vipul Mehta is a storage industry veteran and serves as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at OakGate Technology. In addition to providing Marketing and Sales leadership at OakGate, Vipul plays a key role in driving growth strategies, understanding tactical and strategic needs of customers and cultivating industry partnerships. Most recently, Vipul was a co-founder of Aristos Logic, an enterprise storage start-up whose customers included IBM and Apple. Following the acquisition of Aristos by Adaptec, he served as Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development. Prior to that, Vipul spent 18 years at Western Digital in variety engineering, marketing and planning positions. Earlier in his career, Vipul worked for Xerox and Interdata. Vipul has an engineering degree from Bombay University and pursued MSEE at Rutgers University.

Thomas Nalepa

Principal Engineer, Co-founder

Tom Nalepa is a co-founder of OakGate Technology and serves as a Principal Engineer. Tom has had an illustrious career in the technology industry and has helped pioneer key building blocks in storage validation. He participated in the development of server firmware and silicon validation software at Hewlett Packard. At Agilent Technologies, Tom developed tools and drivers for the Tachyon controller chip which became the industry standard for Fibre Channel products. Following the acquisition of Agilent’s storage silicon business, Tom joined PMC-Sierra and continued innovations in the area of hardware verification. Tom has an engineering degree from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Jim Sladek

CFO

Jim Sladek serves as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at OakGate Technology and provides leadership in all aspects of corporate finance and operations. Most recently, Jim served as Vice President of Finance at Blade Network Technologies, a successful start-up acquired by IBM. Prior to that, Jim spent twenty one years at Hewlett Packard, serving in a variety of management roles within finance for the company's storage, networking, customer support and North American distribution organizations. In addition, Jim played key roles at HP with a number of acquisitions for HP's storage business. Jim has a BS in finance from Purdue University.

Board of Directors

Bob Weisickle

Chairman, Strategy & Technology Officer, and Co-founder

Anil Gupta

President and CEO

Vipul Mehta

VP of Marketing and Business Development

Timothy M. Leyden

Former President, COO, and CFO of WD

Tim Leyden is retired and the former President, COO, and CFO of WD - a subsidiary of Western Digital Corporation, the world’s largest supplier of disk drives. He had contributed to the company in many senior management capacities across three decades, the latest being the president of the WD subsidiary. In his early career at Western Digital, Tim served in various worldwide finance, manufacturing, and information technology capacities in the company's storage controller, semiconductor and hard drive businesses. Tim also held the position of senior vice president and chief financial officer of Sage Software Inc., a subsidiary of Sage Group PLC. Tim received his ACMA (Associate Chartered Management Accountant) certification from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, UK and holds a master's degree in business administration from University of California, Irvine.

Clive Surfleet

Former Senior Executive at IBM and Hewlett Packard Company

Clive has over 40 years of experience in the computer industry in a variety of senior executive roles at IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and various startup companies around the world. These roles include General Management, Networking, Storage, Servers, Marketing and Channels, Research and Development, Operations, Strategic Planning, and Finance. In these roles, Clive has built businesses to over $1B in revenue, managed P&Ls, and managed worldwide organizations. He is an expert in developing and executing successful business plans and partnerships. Clive also ran his own CEO level consulting practice for eight years. Most recently he was the Business Line Executive for IBM System Networking. Clive has a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a MBA, both from the University of California, Berkeley.