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 company’s various lines of business. These include 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 Managed DNS, RFID/Auto-ID, 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, founding the award-winning CompanySleuth product, architected the Electric Library product line, now used in schools and libraries worldwide and built Encyclopedia.com, the internet’s first free enclyopedia . 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 joined the ICANN Board of Directors in November 2008 as a non-voting liaison from the Security and Stability Advisory Committee. 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 named to InfoWorld Magazine's CTO 25 awards in 2010 and 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 startup companies, as well as the Lifeboat Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board. Ram is also actively involved in cancer-related nonprofits.
