Jain is quick to give credit to his business partner, Hajjar. Their association goes back nearly 30 years from their days at Boston University’s College of Engineering. The duo worked together on three startups before forming Spudnik, which eventually changed its name to Prysm. From all accounts, Hajjar is more academically inclined while Jain brings business acumen and management skills to the table. Both though, can fill in for each other when required. In fact, Jain’s master’s thesis involved the design and construction of a magneto-optical ellipsometer, a device that measures a change in polarisation as electromagnetic waves reflect or transmit from a material. Magneto-optical ellipsometers were used on optical data storage like compact disc in 1980s.

“I had no idea at the time that Amit would turn out to be a great manager, businessman, and high-tech executive. Of course, I fully expected him to excel as a professional engineer in the computer industry, but did not recognise his immense managerial talents at the time,” says Masud Mansuripur, professor and chair of optical data storage at the College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona. Mansuripur was Jain’s masters’ thesis advisor and Hajjar’s Ph.D. thesis advisor.

Jain and Hajjar’s partnership is strong. Josh Patrick a financial planner who has worked with the Prysm partners, wrote in a blog published in The New York Times: “They have the same belief systems about what makes a business successful; their disagreements are rare. It’s what has allowed them to stay together in three separate partnerships over more than 20 years.

The duo’s first major success as entrepreneurs was Versatile Optical Networks, the communication network startup that was acquired by Vitesse Semiconductor for $240 million in 2001. From there Jain went on to be the CEO of optical network equipment maker Big Bear Networks, before founding Prysm.

But today, Prysm’s flagship product is the Visual Workplace. When I ask Jain whether the company has become a software developer, he quickly corrects me, “We have not moved from hardware to software. What we are saying is now we offer not just the hardware but a total solution. You buy our hardware for the rooms and buy software licences to access it from remote locations.”

The software industry is, of course, where most Indian-origin leaders made their name, from Sabeer Bhatia and Hotmail in 1990s to Sundar Pichai at Google. But Jain has succeeded in hardware innovation, and merging it with a unique software solution to make a successful business case.

Jain and Hajjar’s academic mentor Mansuripur is proud of their achievement. “It is a cliché that a successful parent is one whose children far surpass him in intellectual and/or worldly accomplishments. By that measure, witnessing the technical and business accomplishments of Jain and Hajjar over the past three decades, I am proud to be known to the world as their academic supervisor,” he says.

Prysm is privately held and Jain is reluctant to share any financial details, but he is confident about its growth prospects. “We might have come when Internet services weren’t good enough, and cloud services may not have evolved, but there is a perfect storm that has allowed Prysm to shine.”

Prysm

Boss, I shrunk the office