Ram Mohan
Ram Mohan is Executive Vice President, & Chief Technology Officer of Afilias Limited. Ram oversees key strategic, management and technology choices for the company in support of the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) .INFO and .ORG, sponsored domains .mobi, .asia, and .aero and country code domains including .IN (India) and .ME (Montenegro). Ram has led the strategic growth of the company in registry services and security as well as new product sectors such as RFID/Auto-ID, global DNS and Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).
Before joining Afilias in September 2001, Ram was at Infonautics Corp., a pioneering online database and content distribution company. He held various leadership positions at Infonautics, and led the company to market leadership through product innovation. Ram is the founder of the award-winning CompanySleuth product, and created the Sleuth line of business at Infonautics. He helped architect Electric Library, North America's most used online reference database in schools and libraries, and Encyclopedia.com, the first free encyclopedia on the Internet. Prior to joining Infonautics, Ram worked with First Data Corporation, Unisys Corporation and KPMG Peat Marwick in a variety of leadership, engineering and technology positions. Ram is also founder of the technology behind TurnTide, an anti-spam company acquired by Symantec.
Ram is active in the ICANN community. He is the author (with others) of the Redemption Grace Period (RGP) and the IDN implementation guidelines, now global industry standards. He led the GNSO IDN Working Group, is a co-founder (along with the UN and the Public Interest Registry) of the Arabic Script IDN Working Group. Ram is a founding member of the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), a Board advisory committee comprised of Internet pioneers and technical experts including operators of Internet root servers, registrars, and TLD registries.
Ram's educational background reflects his belief that technology is best used for business advantage and market leadership. He has a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mangalore, an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management from Bharathidasan University, and left most of the way through his second Master's in Computer Science at Philadelphia's Drexel University in order to take Infonautics public. An inventor, he is the author of several patents.
Ram was previously named one of the Philadelphia Business Journal's 40 under 40. He is a founding member of the ISOC Philadelphia Area Chapter and serves on the advisory boards of several Philadelphia-area startup companies, and is actively involved in cancer-related nonprofits.
Ram Mohan has been appointed to serve as the non-voting liaison from the Security & Stability Advisory Committee starting in 2009 and continuing through 2012.
