
Corporate - Management
Abhijit Phanse
CEO
Abhijit is the CEO of UnitedLayer. He is also the Managing Partner of Accelon Capital, a private equity firm, where he led the acquisition of UnitedLayer in 2010. He has 17 years of experience in starting, growing, and operating technology businesses.
Previously, Abhijit co-founded Scintera and was its CEO. Scintera is funded by August Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Sevin Rosen Funds, and Ridgewood Capital and is the leading provider of CMOS processors for enhancing wireless base station efficiency.
Abhijit was also involved in bringing together an international consortium of 60 companies in North America, Europe, and Asia, to support an IEEE standard for 10G networking. Before Scintera, Abhijit held senior management positions at National Semiconductor where he led the development and commercialization of three generations of Ethernet networking products. He was also involved in many mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships.
Abhijit has an MS in Management from the Stanford Business School, an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Central Florida, and a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He has authored numerous publications and has over 50 US patents. Abhijit enjoys wind surfing and playing the guitar. He and his wife, Prajakta, have 2 young sons.
Edward Buck
VP Services and Support
Edward Buck is Vice President, Services and Support at UnitedLayer. Buck's executive responsibility includes the design, delivery and support of all UnitedLayer services.
Prior to joining UnitedLayer, Buck founded ASPextra, a company focused on providing scalable and highly available managed hosting solutions. At ASPextra, Buck built a network and services delivery infrastructure comprising multiple, geographically dispersed data centers serving customers in the US, Europe and Asia. ASPextra was acquired by UnitedLayer in 2006.
Prior to ASPextra, Buck was senior manager at Oracle, where his responsibilities included corporate business development, technology acquisitions and strategic alliances. While serving at Oracle, Buck was deeply involved in the technical evaluation, acquisition and implementation of Internet and e-commerce technologies that shaped much of how the Internet evolved in its early years.
Buck is a regular contributor to a number of open source projects. He received his B.A. from Pomona College.
Mukund Chavan
VP Software Engineering
Mukund joined UnitedLayer in 2011 and is responsible for development of UnitedLayer's solutions in Cloud, Availability and Disaster Recovery, and new services. He works closely with Unitedlayer's customers and is involved in Business Development and Strategic initiatives.
Prior to joining UnitedLayer, Mukund was the Founder and CTO at RackWare Inc. a company focused on software for stateless compute. Before RackWare, Mukund was the VP of Technology at Emulex Corp. At Emulex, Mukund was responsible for architecting and delivering Emulex’s industry leading 16Gbps FC and 40Gbps Ethernet and CNA solutions. He was also involved in due diligence of partnerships and acquisitions.
Mukund joined Emulex when it acquired Aarohi Communications – a venture funded company he co-founded. Prior to Aarohi, Mukund was the Founder and VP of Engineering at Hyperion Technologies, a design-consulting services company. Earlier in his career, Mukund led and designed Forward Error Correction ASICs at LSI Logic and designed CPU’s at Intel.
Mukund has a BS in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and has taken graduate engineering courses at Stanford University. Mukund is a co-author of 2 patents. During his spare time, Mukund likes playing soccer with his son and push his daughter on the swing.
Aaron Hughes
Chief Network Architect
Aaron joined UnitedLayer in December of 2007 and is currently its Chief Network Architect. He brings more than 15 years of experience in the telecommunications industry and is responsible for all network topology planning, design and operations.
Aaron also works with the design team at Lockheed Martin Transformational Satellite (TSAT) Communications ground-based Mission Operations System (TMOS) program (a $2.02 billion cost-plus award fee contract).
Prior to joining UnitedLayer, Aaron was VP of Technology at Terremark World Wide, Inc., a leading operator of integrated Tier-1 Network Access Points (NAPs) and best-in-class network services. Prior to joining Terremark, Aaron led operations, sales engineering and planning and design as VP of Operations at YellowBrix - a content distribution company based on proprietary technology which uses Artificial Intelligence, linguistic pattern analysis, and entity identification to contextually analyze information and deliver it to clients.
Aaron has also held network and system architecture roles at Certainty Solutions, Quest Technologies, RCN, UltraNet and Channel(1) Communications.
Dell Stortroen
Chief of Facilities Engineering
Dell has 30 years of experience as a California State C-10 Electrical Contractor designing complex electrical systems. He has been designing and building physical environments like power, cooling, and connectivity of UnitedLayer's datacenters. He is responsible for retrofitting existing datacenters and doing new datacenter build outs and expansions.
Dell oversees regular preventative maintenance of all electrical and mechanical systems to ensure customer uptime and is also responsible for driving UnitedLayer's green datacenter initiatives.
Dell is trained in shipboard operations and engineering. He attained leadership rank, rising from leading seaman and midshipman to chief helmsman and navigations officer, for a private oceanic research firm as a young 21-year old. Dell has done coursework in oceanography and limnology at University of Washington, Seattle, which has added to his scientific and engineering background.
Dell is an avid golfer and sometimes musician with recording credits. Raised in San Francisco, he currently lives in nearby Sonoma County with his uber-tolerent wife of 31 years, Karen, and they have proudly produced two kids, now aged 20 & 23 years and going to nearby colleges.
Wenda Thompson
Vice President of Finance & Administration
Wenda has broad responsibilities across the organization in Finance, Contracts, Human Resources, Compliance, Audits, and Operational Controls. Prior to joining UnitedLayer, Wenda was President of Aero Logistics, a premier provider of 3PL services.
After joining the company in 2005, her drive and initiatives won her the Presidency, where she continued the growth strategy that drove the company and matched her passion for building great teams and corporate cultures focused solely on the customer.
Prior to joining Aero Logistics, Wenda was at video game retailer FuncoLand/Game Stop, where she rose rapidly from store-level salesperson to become General Manager of four corporate departments. At FunoLand her track record includes building high performance teams that added to the company's hyper-growth phase, and also grew the online division over ten-fold.
Wenda received her BS in Finance and Entrepreneurial Management from the University of Minnesota and her MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She enjoys golfing, hiking, waterskiing and traveling.











