Andreas Bechtolsheim

Andreas Bechtolsheim was co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Inc. and employee number one. He is currently Chief Architect and Senior Vice President, Network Systems organization and is also a member of Sun's executive management team. He was formerly Vice President of Technology and Chief Architect of Sun's highly successful workstation product line. He invented the "Stanford University Network workstation" that eventually became the Sun-1 Workstation and was instrumental in launching other successful Sun products, including the SparcStation 1.

Andreas left Sun in 1995 to found Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet start-up company that was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996. Andreas became Vice President of Engineering and later Vice President General Manager of Cisco's Gigabit Systems business which developed the Catalyst 4000 family, the industry's highest volume modular Ethernet switching platform.

He left Cisco for Kealia, Inc., a company which he co-founded to develop advanced server technology. He returned to Sun when they acquired Kealia in 2004.

Andreas received a MS in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1976 and he was a PhD student in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from1977 to 1982. He has been honored with a Fulbright scholarship, a German National Merit Foundation scholarship, the Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the year award, the Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.