A 1992 MS graduate, Alagu Periyannan has over 30 years of research, product development, and strategy experience bringing innovative networking and video products to market. In 2009, Alagu co-founded Blue Jeans Network (acquired by Verizon in 2020), a premium secure video conferencing platform, where he served as Chief Technology Officer until it was acquired by Verizon in 2020. He now serves as Vice President, Advanced Collaboration Technologies at Verizon. Prior to founding Blue Jeans Network, Alagu was Entrepreneur in Residence at Norwest Venture Partners and Greylock Partners. He served as Chief Technology Officer at Blue Coat Systems, a leader in network security and WAN optimization appliances that is currently part of Symantec. During his tenure at Blue Coat he held various senior R&D management positions and was part of the management team responsible for leading the company through its successful repositioning from CacheFlow, a maker of web and video caching appliances, to Blue Coat. He also led the team that was responsible for the company’s entry into the WAN optimization market. Prior to CacheFlow, Alagu was an early member of the management team at Entera, an Internet content delivery startup. He built an R&D team from the ground up to deliver streaming video caching products for the Content Delivery Network (CDN) market, culminating in a successful sale of the company to CacheFlow in 2000.Before joining Entera, Alagu spent eight years at Apple and held various research and product development roles in networking and video over networks in the Advanced Technology Group (ATG) and then as a founding member of the QuickTime Streaming Team, which received an Emmy award for its pioneering work in creating video streaming technology.Alagu has more than 35 pending and issued patents to his name over his technology career at Apple, Blue Coat and BlueJeans/Verizon. Alagu is a loyal supporter of NC State’s Entrepreneurship programs. For nearly a decade, he has hosted NC State Entrepreneurship and Engineering Entrepreneurship Program (EEP) students participating in Dr. Tom Miller’s annual student trip to Silicon Valley. Alagu has served as a member of NC State Entrepreneurship’s Advisory Board since 2020. Alagu and his wife, Dr. Theivanai Palaniappan, established one of the first endowed scholarships at NC State to boost support for females and underrepresented students pursuing entrepreneurial careers.Alagu has mentored countless aspiring NC State student entrepreneurs and is involved with mentoring programs in Silicon Valley and in India. Alagu is also an angel investor for startup companies in the US and India.