Romulus Pereira became president and CEO of Riverstone Networks in February 2000, when the company spun out of Cabletron Systems. Pereira, who holds an MS degree in computer engineering from Santa Clara University, led Riverstone to the first successful technology public offering in 2001, despite turbulent market conditions. Pereira has led Riverstone from being a virtually unknown company to a leader in the network industry, and a recognized visionary in the metro area network market.

In 1996, Romulus Pereira, a Goan, along with two other Indian friends, founded Yago Systems, which was named by Data Communications as one of ‘The Top 25 Hot Startups’ in 1997, and as one of the top ‘Ten Companies to Watch,’ in 1998 by Network World. Prior to co-founding Yago, Romulus was at Cisco Systems and Kalpana, where he was instrumental in driving hardware interface specifications and designing hybrid-switching engines that maximized performance and minimized cost

Pereira has built his career on the ability to foresee the needs of service providers in the networking market and developing technologies and products to meet those needs.

He pioneered Riverstone development of ‘service-enabling technologies,’ such as dynamic bandwidth provisioning, IP-based VPNs, and better accounting and billing features. As bandwidth prices continue to fall, and carriers and service providers face declining revenue and increasing costs, Riverstone’s service-creation strategy proved to be a success and led the company to the forefront of the metro service platform market.

He is an active participant in the Silicon Valley Indian community, and regularly participates in events for young Indian entrepreneurs run by Silicon India.n