Mark Urdahl

Mark Urdahl is the CEO of vScale Systems, which develops and supplies cloud-computing infrastructure products and services.  He previously served as the founding CEO of Virtual Instruments responsible for strategy and operations from June 2008 until May 2010.  He has over 20 years of experience in the tech sector, serves as Managing Partner of White Dove Partners, an investment and advisory firm, and led the acquisition of the NetWisdom business from Finisar. Mr. Urdahl previously served as Chairman and CEO of Applied Science Fiction (ASF), a spinout from the IBM Corporation, which was acquired by the Eastman Kodak Company. Mr. Urdahl’s successful spinout of ASF was preceded by a distinguished career at IBM, where he held management positions in marketing and sales, technology development, corporate development, leading the first institutional investment in Ancor Communications, a developer of Fibre Channel switches that was acquired by Qlogic in May 2000 for approximately $1.7 billion. Mr. Urdahl sponsored IBM’s Fibre Channel program, and partnered with executives at Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems to found the Fibre Channel Systems Initiative and the Fibre Channel Industry Association, both highly successful industry initiatives to commercialize Fibre Channel technologies resulting in today’s $22 billion Fibre Channel storage area network industry. Mr. Urdahl received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Economics from UC Santa Barbara and advanced executive training at the Wharton School of Business, Harvard Business School, and Stanford University.