Zephyr

The team behind Zephyr

We have assembled an executive team with over 40 years in the testing space as well as experience in other technology fields. We are proud to have a solid Advisory Board that is helping us chart the right direction. As a team, we strive to provide great products and great support to our customers, while having fun doing it!

Samir Shah

CEO and Founder

Samir Shah is a seasoned QA Executive with over 16 years of direct test management experience ranging from startups in the Silicon Valley to global Fortune 50. Most recently, he was Vice President of QA Practice at Patni Computers (NYSE: PTI) where over a period of 6 years, founded, built and managed a 300+ person Global QA Practice generating $75 million in testing revenue. His broad experience includes various Engineering roles at Wollongong, Attachmate, and PointCast, helping customers such as AT&T, Virgin Mobile, Disney Mobile, Du, Good Technologies, Vodafone, WhitePajama, Bulldog, Grand Central, RCC, Visage Mobile, KnowNow and others.

Samir holds a Bachelor Degree in Electronics from Bangalore University and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from The University of Alabama. Having been on the "other side" and perpetually unsatisfied about the quality, pricing and user experience of existing Test Management tools, Samir founded D Software and Zephyr to take on the challenge of bringing to market a refreshing new way of managing test teams.

Keith Cook

Global VP of Sales & BD

Keith is a senior executive who possesses 18 years of experience in sales, business development and marketing selling to enterprise, IT and mobile software companies. Keith joins Zephyr from Smashcode, a developer of a text message application toolkit, where he was the VP of Sales and Business Development. Prior, Keith was the VP of Sales and Business Development, and founding team member, at DeviceAnywhere, a software solution provider to the mobile ecosystem, where he built strategic partnerships and alliances throughout the industry. Early in his career, Keith spent seven years at IBM in various sales roles in the Rational Software Division.

Keith received his B.S. Degree in Communications from Northwestern University.

Issam Bandak

VP of Operations

Issam Bandak's focus for the last 14 years has been in product and services QA, building, leading and managing test and engineering teams of varying sizes for startups, SMB and large companies. Issam has worked with companies such as Virgin Mobile, PointCast, Cingular, Wollongong, KnowNow, Grand Central, Carphone Warehouse, WhitePajama among others.

He has run large community and software delivery sites in the early days of the Internet including the wildly popular Papa Winsock-L site. Issam holds a Bachelor Degree in Information Technology from the Indiana State University.

Shailesh Mangal

Chief Architect

Shailesh Mangal is the Chief Architect and technology visionary at Zephyr. He has been developing enterprise and web applications for 14 years professionally, and has developed applications using Flex, LCDS, AIR, Java, Ruby, Groovy, etc. His main areas of interest include object-oriented design, system and cloud architectures, data dynamism, real time search and testing. He has yet to meet a technology he doesn't want to play with!

Shailesh holds a Masters in IT from The University of Texas and a Bachelors in Engineering from India.

Sanjay Zalavadia

Director of Professional Services

Sanjay brings over 15 years of leadership experience in IT and Technical Support Services. Throughout his career, Sanjay has successfully established and grown premier IT and Support Services teams across multiple geographies for both large and small companies. Most recently, he was Associate Vice President at Patni Computers (NYSE: PTI) responsible for the Telecoms IT Managed Services Practice where he established IT Operations teams supporting Virgin Mobile, ESPN Mobile, Disney Mobile and Carphone Warehouse. Prior to this Sanjay was responsible for Global Technical Support at Bay Networks, a leading routing and switching vendor, which was acquired by Nortel. Sanjay has also held management positions in Support Service organizations at start-up Silicon Valley Networks, a vendor of Test Management software, and SynOptics.

Sanjay is a graduate of the Manipal Institute of Technology in India and VirginiaTech in Blacksburg, Virginia.