Mano Murthy, the CEO and co-founder of Allegro Systems—acquired by Cisco Systems in July 2001, in a stock deal valued at $181 million—is also a music composer of some might. In fact, Murthy the composer has at times shadowed Murthy the entrepreneur. He composed music for the popular 1997 film America! America! and the 1999 Kannada film Nanna Preethiya Hudugi.

Murthy’s extracurricular activities, however, have not come in the way of his high-powered career as the co-founder of three different technology companies. He holds patents in port monitoring in switches, and has done pioneering work in layer 2/3 VLAN switching.

Murthy started his career at Nortel (Bell Northern Research) in 1979, developing telephony and voice/data equipment. He co-founded Alantec in 1990, and pioneered the first layer 2-3 switches to be introduced in the networking industry. Alantec went public in 1994 and was subsequently acquired by Fore Systems in 1996. Murthy co-found Assured Access Technologies in 1996 to develop high performance/high availability remote access hubs for the service provider market.

Assured Access developed a very successful product and was acquired by Alcatel in 1999. Murthy then co-found Allegro Systems in 2000 to develop gigabit VPN technology—a project that was funded by Cisco. Allegro was acquired by Cisco in 2001. Currently, Murthy is senior engineering manager in the VPN/VSEC business unit at Cisco.

Born in Bangalore, Murthy did his BE from Bangalore University, and moved to the US in 1976. He completed his graduate studies at University of California and Stanford University in electrical engineering and computer science, respectively. Murthy has had formal education in western classical music and even taken tabla lessons from maestro Zakhir Hussain. He is currently working on composing the score for two films to be released next year. He lives with his wife and two teenage children in Silicon Valley.

"Companies are about building something and working towards a goal. Music is therapeutic, and that’s my way of relaxing For both, you keep focused and you keep going," he once said in an interview. n