Shekar Ayyar

Shekar Ayyar is a seasoned technology executive and industry leader with over twenty-five years of experience spanning general management, research, strategy, mergers & acquisitions and business development. Before joining Arrcus, Shekar was Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Telco and Edge Cloud business at VMware. He incubated and grew this business to become one of the largest vertical opportunities for VMware in the context of 5G and Edge Computing.

Prior to his General manager role, Shekar was EVP of Strategy and Corporate Development, leading VMware’s M&A and strategic investments for several years. From opportunity and target identification, to deal structuring, negotiation, and closure, he oversaw over 60 acquisitions and investments across a wide range of target companies and transaction sizes. These included the acquisitions of Nicira for software defined networking, Airwatch for mobility management, Velocloud for software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), Heptio for cloud-native Kubernetes orchestration, and Uhana for AI driven closed loop automation of mobile networks.

Before joining VMware in 2007, Shekar led product management and business development at companies like BindView, a compliance and security software company acquired by Symantec and Instantis, Inc. a web application automation company acquired by Oracle. In prior roles at other companies, including Lucent and McKinsey, Shekar advised C-level executives on a wide range of strategic technology and business decisions.

Shekar has an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated as a Palmer Scholar. He also holds a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, both in electrical engineering.

Shekar is on the board of Altair as well as the regional board of Room to Read, a non-profit focused on supporting literacy and girls’ education globally.