Advisory Board
Michael Hurlston
Advisory Board Member
Michael joined Astral Analytics as an advisory board member in Aug 2019. He currently serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of Synaptics Inc. a leading developer of human interface solutions, and has also served on the Board of Directors of Ubiquiti Networks since August 2016.
A highly successful technology executive, Michael was previously CEO and on the Board of Directors of Finisar Corporation an optical communications company. This followed senior leadership roles in sales, marketing and general management at Broadcom.
Prior to joining Broadcom in 2001, he held senior marketing and engineering positions at Oren Semiconductor, Inc., Avasem, Integrated Circuit Systems, Micro Power Systems, Exar and IC Works. Michael has a B.S.E.E., an M.S.E.E. and an M.B.A. from the University of California, Davis.
Anand Oswal
Advisory Board Member
Anand joined Astral Analytics as an advisory board member in May 2020. He currently serves as Senior Vice President and GM at cyber security leader Palo Alto Networks.
Prior to this he was Senior VP of Engineering for Cisco’s Intent-Based Networking Group where he was responsible for building the entire set of platforms, from switching, routing and wireless to IoT and cloud services, that make up Cisco’s extensive enterprise networking portfolio. Anand joined Cisco via the acquisition of Starent Networks, a leader in mobile packet core gateways.
Anand is a gifted, dynamic leader, highly experienced in building strong, diverse, and motivated teams. He holds more than 60 U.S. patents and has both a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications from Pune, India and a master’s degree in computer networking from University of Southern California.
Leadership Team
Rajesh Subramaniam
CEO & Founder
As Founder and CEO, Rajesh has led Astral Analytics and its sister company embedUR systems through more than a decade of profitability and successive growth averaging 35% per year, and has built a loyal customer base among F500 Network and Telecom equipment providers, and Communications Service Providers around the world.
With a Masters in Electrical Engineering from University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and an unrelenting determination, Rajesh rose through the engineering management ranks at various startups and public companies such as Schlumberger, Bay Networks, Atoga Systems and ARRIS, designing enterprise and carrier network equipment during the 90’s Silicon Valley boom.
From these experiences Rajesh envision a flourishing market for embedded-systems for networking equipment and connected devices, so in 2004, together with others from Atoga he founded embedUR.
Later after establishing embedUR as a highly respected powerhouse for Wi-Fi integration, he set about solving the emerging problem of Wi-Fi Service Assurance for Service Providers. This let to the formation of Astral Analytics .
Samir Virmani
Co-Founder, Vice President Solutions Engineering
Samir has served in various engineering capacities within embedUR systems since its inception in 2004. He brings close to 20 years of engineering experience in Control & Data Acquisition Systems, Enterprise Wi-Fi, Data Networking and Residential Gateway solutions.
He started his career in Data Acquisition systems with stints in India and US prior to helping deliver an ATM based Multi-Service Provisioning Platform at NET. He then went onto build Packet Over SONET/SDH based Multi-Service Provisioning Platforms at Atoga System prior to joining embedUR Systems. Here he has led and delivered multiple critical projects in various technology areas. Samir holds a Master’s in Computer Applications from University of Pune, India.
Eric Smiley
Senior Director, Business Development
As a Business Development and Product Management leader, Eric works closely with customers and partners to leverage the company’s expertise and technology to help service providers solve networking challenges.
Studying at Duke University, Eric earned undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and co-founded a Wi-Fi security start-up. He continued his career at Hatteras Network as a QA and Sales Engineer gaining Carrier networking deployment experience.
This led to an opportunity with a dark fiber service provider to design, deploy and manage networks for School districts. Eric then joined LVL7 Systems as a Field Applications Engineer helping to market Switching and Wireless software solutions for embedded networking products. When Broadcom acquired LVL7, Eric stepped into a Product Line Management role assisting with the formation and rapid growth of Broadcom’s Enterprise Wi-Fi group.
Weldon Roy
Director of Engineering
As Director of Engineering, Weldon brings over 30 years of tech experience developed while working for world class companies such as Nortel and Avaya. His communication, process and organizational skills are instrumental in ensuring partners meet their success criteria.
With a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, Weldon started out developing software features for Nortel’s Meridian 1 PBX. His move to Silicon Valley led to Data Networking technology, managing software teams working on Nortel’s Passport 8600/8300 and 1600 enterprise data switches. Weldon’s career was then enhanced by changing focus to Program Management and helping to lead the very successful Enterprise Data Networking Stacking team at Avaya.
In addition, Weldon’s leadership of the Program Management team at Astral Analytics for the past 4 years has given him deep insight into the Wi-Fi market. This is due to working with major Service Providers, OEMs and ODMs located around the world.
John Marconi
Chief Architect and Principal Engineer
John has designed, developed, and fielded many products and features over the last 25 years. He has been instrumental in the creation of several award-winning software solutions. John leads product architecture and has a broad and deep knowledge spanning low level device driver functionality and embedded system performance through cloud scaling and design.
He has a passion for bringing advanced enterprise Wi-Fi features out of the corporate office and into the service provider and home. John was deeply involved in designing the ML / AI architecture for optimization real world data and delivering actionable insights to Service Providers.
He started his career in embedded system design developing software for high performance/bleeding edge processor SoCs and network processors serving 3G/4G data. He has been the lead architect and designer across many products in his 25 year career.