MANAGEMENT BIOGRAPHIES
Jamal Mazhar, Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Jamal Mazhar possesses more than 15 years of experience in technology, engineering and consulting with a range of Fortune 500 companies including General Electric Capital and ING U.S. Financial Services. Prior to starting Kaavo, he established technology infrastructure and product development operations in India for a Canadian business analytics startup.
Previously, Mr. Mazhar managed integration, development and continual improvements to IT assets while working at ING. He established ING’s “Center of Excellence for B2B” which streamlined $2 billion per month in electronic money transfer operations. As Lead Architect at GE Capital e-Business team, Mr. Mazhar directed analysis and implementation efforts and improved the performance of the website generating more than $1 billion in annual lease revenues. At Trilogy Software, an innovative technology company, Mr. Mazhar provided technical and managerial expertise for several large scale e-business implementation projects for companies such as Boeing, NCR, Gartner, British Airways, Qantas Airways and Alltel.
Mr. Mazhar earned his BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and MBA from NYU Stern School of Business.
Shahzad Pervez, Chief Technology Officer & Vice President, Engineering
In several senior management roles, Shahzad Pervez brings to Kaavo over 15 years of experience in software product development and IT as well as significant management expertise. Prior to joining Kaavo, Mr. Pervez was the Director of Enterprise Architecture framework at ING, responsible for a $2 million annual budget and mission critical production systems. Through open source technologies and best practices for full systems development lifecycle, he helped create a Center of Excellence for Java and .NET to provide reference tools, guidance, training and consulting to all the relevant projects at ING.
Previously, Mr. Pervez oversaw website architecture and content management system initiatives at PennMutual Life Insurance Company, the second oldest mutual life insurer in the U.S. Directing a number of multi-million dollar e-business deployments for over a dozen Fortune 500 companies; he led internal project management and infrastructure initiatives, and established and led quality engineering group at Trilogy. At Trilogy for his outstanding leadership in technology implementation of GartnerOne at Gartner Group, he received standing ovation at the Gartner sales conference and a letter raving his leadership and execution from the Gartner CEO.
Mr. Pervez received a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a MS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.
Sam Somashekar, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
Sam Somashekar is responsible for leading all marketing and business development initiatives at Kaavo. These include driving strategic partnerships, product marketing, product management, thought leadership and industry presence.
Mr. Somashekar has over 18 years of experience demonstrating success in enterprise product management and development, market research and strategy, marketing and business development. Prior to Kaavo, he held various senior management roles at public and private companies, including Senior Director of Product Management at CA Technologies (a leading IT management software and solutions company). He has proven success in establishing, developing, and inspiring high-performance teams, providing product vision and delivering the best value to customers. At CA, Mr. Somashekar’s responsibilities included creating and managing global product strategy for key industry areas such as cloud computing, data center automation, service automation, and green IT. Throughout his career Mr. Somashekar has provided leadership and vision to increase both top line and bottom line growth, maximizing profitability while addressing challenging and realistic problems.
Mr. Somashekar holds a BA in Computer Science from New York University and is Pragmatic Marketing Certified. He is on the board of AFCOM’s Data Center Institute (DCI), and has authored several articles and whitepapers on the subject of enterprise IT management. Mr. Somashekar has also been quoted in articles appearing in leading industry publications such as InfoWorld and Computerworld and has been a regular speaker at industry events.
