“TaeKwon-Do and technology provide opportunities to push limits and produce results,” he begins. Dr Ahuja has conceived, invented, brought to market and successfully exited four startups. He says, “My passion is to identify change, the opportunity that is thus created, inventing and bringing solutions to market that address the needs of the markets impacted by those shifts”.
He already has 71 patents issued to his name; is a sixth-degree black belt in TaeKwon-Do and an avid practitioner of QiGong, weight training and running and is an ardent student of strategy and a follower of Sun Tzu’s Art Of War.
Dr Ahuja recently joined Pure Storage Inc as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Security in April 2021. He brings decades of experience in networking and cybersecurity along with organizational and leadership ability to help improve the security posture of Pure Storage’s products.
Ratinder was born into an Army family – he had the chance to see and experience the cultures and traditions of different cities. His father, Satinder Paul Singh, who retired as Chief Engineer Northern Command in the Military Engineering Service, was stationed in Udhampur when Ratinder was born. “We would get transferred to a new place. And my earliest memories are of Pathankot. Many times, my father would get posted to areas where we couldn’t move and then, we would go back to our place in Ludhiana.”
The child was probably curious and his curiosity was well-fed by his father. “I had my own lab and my father and I’d often do physics, chemistry and electrical engineering experiments in my small personal lab,” he chuckles. But his mother, Jaswinder Kaur, wanted him to become a surgeon. “Electronics interested me more.” He completed his pre-engineering at Ram Sukhdas Engineering College, Firozpur, in 1982 scoring 99.9% in the critical subjects of physics, chemistry and math, and studied Electronic Engineering at Thapar Engineering College, Patiala.
“The other wish that my mother expressed was for me to go to the US. How could I have denied her (laughing)!” Ratinder searched for the right place – and found that Iowa State University had a Computer Engineering program that covered both hardware and software. “I would make all these electronic projects, build audio video systems and all kinds of electronic widgets. And Iowa seemed like the right place, so I took admission there. And the next thing I know, you know, I’m on a plane to Iowa!” He landed in the USA in 1986.
He remembers the town as a small university town in the middle of nowhere, where only students – as many as 50,000 of them – lived.
And the city would practically go empty during vacations.
Quick Learner
Ratinder completed his master’s degree in just a year. “I was told graduates typically took three courses. I wondered – Really! Back in India, students took like seven or eight courses – So I took four courses every semester. And then within a year, I was done. And then I did my master’s thesis, and also got a minor in Computer Science. So that was all fun.”
By this time, he was also working on some research projects and was getting paid as well. He absolutely loved learning and earning going hand-in-hand!
Ratinder rates the Indian school system very highly. “The discipline that the Indian education system teaches is irreplaceable. It structures students and gives a logical mindset from the beginning. The US gives too much freedom to students.”
During his research at Iowa State University under Dr Douglas Jacobson, a visionary computer scientist, he worked on complex topics such as voice-data-video integrated networks (a forerunner to Skype), data communication protocols, and earned a PhD in 1989 in computer engineering.
Besides, he practiced TaeKwon-Do and also learnt the ancient Chinese practice of Qi-Gong or Chi Kung and ultimately earned a sixth-degree black belt in TaeKwon-Do in 2015, thus giving him the coveted title of a TaeKwon-Do Master.
Creative Period
His run of starting successful companies has just started.
In 1994, while working with three of his colleagues, he launched his first company, Internet Junction, in the field of connecting different networks, which received widespread acknowledgement and was acquired by CISCO Systems. He worked with CISCO for a few years and then launched his second company, Web Stacks, in 2001. It was a first-of-its-kind gigabit speed content switching engine with applications such as load balancing and application stream switching. Web Stacks was acquired by Extreme Networks in 2001. He then launched Reconnex in 2003 and brought to market a best-in-class information protection system that is widely used throughout the world. It was acquired by McAfee in 2008. He was retained as the CTO and VP for the Network, Cloud and Content Security Business Units at McAfee/ Intel Security Group.
His hunger to build something new remained intact and in 2015 created his fourth company, ShieldX Networks, and brought out a Cloud-native security solution for modern enterprises’ multi-cloud infrastructure. ShieldX was acquired by Fortinet in 2021.
Ratinder also serves on a number of boards; the most notable one is Nine Star University (now California University, Silicon Valley), started by his QiGong master, Dr Philip Yang, to impart higher education in healthcare.
He has about 71 issued patents and has received numerous awards and titles which he casually brushes aside by not adhering much importance to them.
Fearlessness
Revealing that the ability to create is intrinsically linked to fearlessness, he credits it to his parents. “I’ve always sort of grown up with that, with my parents saying, ‘Go for it’. So when I leave a job and start something new, I do it because I so believe in myself. I think that was instilled in me by my parents.”
What he learnt as a child seems easy to incorporate but yet is difficult. His idea, however, is simple. “Believe in yourself; don’t worry about the outcome, enjoy the challenge, learn and grow! And then I think if you look at our culture, it’s sort of ingrained in you. So it is built into the DNA in some way that you have this undying faith and fearlessness.”
Rightly so as Ratinder’s maternal grandfather, Sardar Harnam Singh Bhatia’s (the first Secretary of the SGPC) teachings and way of explaining the principles of Sikhism remain ingrained in him. His paternal grandfather, Sardar Brij Paul Singh, a lawyer, had single-handedly created a vast business empire spanning multiple industries. Listening about him, Ratinder learned the timeless concepts of strategy that he applies to almost everything he does.
He met his life partner IL Hwa Kim ‘Mina’ during a TaeKwon-Do class. “She was one of my students. She found my classes too difficult so she took to studying yoga instead and now she takes yoga classes regularly– though she is Korean! Mina is an entrepreneur running a small business.”
Ratinder’s inventions and contributions have been visionary and ahead of their times. He has given several presentations explaining his ideas in many public forums including the Content Protection Summit, IC3, IEEE Computer Society, McAfee FOCUS and the Cloud Expo.
All the while, he stays unassuming and a man with a golden heart, hoping to spread happiness all around.