The Team

Imran Sharif
President/CEO

Imran Sharif is the founder and CEO of UNIQA since the start of the company. Prior to that, Imran was the manager for OEM products in Networking Division of then Digital Equipment (now Hewlett Packard) for 4 years. His career started at Emulex Corporation, a $450 million company in 2011, which later spun out its then semiconductor division as Qlogic Corporation having a revenue of over $600 million in 2011. He either established or expanded presence of both Emulex and Qlogic in Asia Pacific including Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, and especially Japan for 5 years

Imran has equal experience in spearheading software engineering developments as well as delivering results in revenue, profitability and operational performance. His equal experience in software and semiconductor sales for over 15 years together with his vast and extensive experience in taking technologies from Silicon Valley and selling to Japanese IT companies is a rarity. Imran holds patents in set top box technology. He has participated in over 10 startup companies’ round of investments as adviser or board member in Silicon Valley and Japan.

Ricky Ryusaku Nakanishi
Chief Operating Officer

Ricky Nakanishi has been COO at UNIQA since 2011. Ricky has been intimately involved in digital media industry for over 10 years. Although by trade he is an engineer, previously he was the last CEO of Zentek, a $200 million company that was publicly listed in NASDAQ Japan before it folded its operations in 2009.
 
Ricky started his career at Panasonic. He was intimately involved in Panasonic's aggressive venture into operating systems for consumer electronics products. Later he gathered vast experience in digital broadcast related technologies and software including DVB, ARIB, ATSC, MHP, BML, etc. Ricky understands the digital media technology food chain very well starting from ODMs in China to the brand names sold in the stores in Japan, USA and Europe. Ricky graduated with a B.S. in law from Chuo University, one of the "Ivy league" schools in Japan.

Syed Shabbir Husain
Chief Technical Officer

Shabbir Husain, CTO of UNIQA has been with the company since 2000. Throughout his career at UNIQA, he has designed and guided development of software technologies including detailed design of a clean room browser for set top box, create middleware architecture for STB, and complete IP phone system. He has also been an architect in projects involving low level OS for set top boxes as well. These set top boxes are used in Japan as OTT appliances and with digital TV for a number of years. Shabbir has also designed many Android applications used in cell phones and tablets in Japan for the last 5 years.

He studied Electrical Engineering in the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur, India. Shabbir started his software programming life very early in his teens. While still in high school, in late 1980s, he worked as programmer in a number of software companies developing database oriented business software. He continued as a freelance programmer until he graduated in the 90s. Shabbir holds patents in set top box and encryption technologies. His continued and diversified research enables the company to regularly venture into new technologies and techniques.