This week I worked on the paperwork to get on the board of E2E Networks Ltd as one of the Independent Director. It was quite an interesting process as this is the first time I am joining the board of directors of an organisation.

About E2E

Not to be confused by the “Networks” in the name, E2E is in the business of selling high powered, low cost compute (Virtual machines) hosted in India targeted towards Indian organisations. It’s one of the very few organisations of its kind which is listed at the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) since 15th May 2018. E2E was started by Tarun Dua and Mohammed Imran. I know Tarun since a really long time (if I remember correctly, probably since 2010). It has been good to see the organisation grow from a very small team to where it stands now. While AWS, Azure and now Google Cloud are helping to grow the market of Cloud Computing, there’s still a gap of providers who can offer much more competitive pricing for the monster machines for lesser overbuild which large cloud providers do.

Quick links about E2E

• List of other board members here
• List of E2E’s team members here
• E2E has its own ASN but relies on Netmagic’s AS17439 for originating pools. HE’s BGP toolkit for E2E’s prefixes here
• News on listing here

Thoughts on DSC, DIN and OS X!

Director of an organisation (private or listed) have to maintain a DIN i.e Director Identification Number in India. Now to get a DIN, one needs a DSC which is Digital Signing Certificate. DSC uses RSA keys and Government of India has recognised around 9 Certifying authorities for it (listed here). So one gets key loaded in a physical device. As soon as you have a physical device in the picture and Mac OS X cannot recognise it, it’s a problem. Most of the driver packages offered by the vendors are unsigned and I personally don’t like installing those packages on the base machine I use. Besides those drivers, one also needs the emsigner package to associated DSC with DIN which again happens to be another package to make the whole stack work.
Thus to make it all work securely, I ended up in putting a Windows VM on Virtualbox locally, thus in an isolated instance for such tasks only.

My involvement…

I will be on the board to contribute as an independent director. It’s a non-executive role and thus I won’t have any involvement in the day to day things but just macro level picture of the things and involvement in board meetings. I continue with my full-time job at Hurricane Electric. It would be great to learn corporate governance by looking at how things work at the board of a company.

Well, so that’s all for now. Time to get back to work! 🙂