Mr. Rajiv Batra (BT/EE/1982) & Mrs. Ritu Batra instituted the Rajiv and Ritu Batra New Faculty Chair. Mr. Batra is a Founder of Palo Alto Networks and was responsible for building and leading the engineering department from inception. At Palo Alto Networks he held many positions including Founder, Member Office of CEO and Senior Vice President of Engineering. Palo Alto Networks is the largest independent enterprise security company in the world. Prior to founding Palo Alto, Mr. Batra was the Vice President of Engineering at Peribit Networks. Peribit Networks built industry leading products in the area of WAN Optimization and WAN Acceleration. It was acquired by Juniper Networks in July of 2005. Dr. Batra was also the Founder and VP of Engineering at VitalSigns Networks that was later acquired by International Network Services in 1998.
Mr. Batra was awarded the 2012 Entrepreneurial Achievement Award by University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a past Chair of the UW-Madison Computer Sciences Board of Visitors and serves on the Board of Directors of the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association. He also serves on the Board of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Mr. Batra holds an MS degree in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1983. IITK conferred upon Dr. Rajiv Batra the Distinguished Alumnus Award 2020.