He joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1986 and worked to improve the quality and reliability of packet networks. He led the team that developed AT&T's Fast Automated Restoration System, which quickly restores services when a high-capacity optical fiber is cut. He also served as interim president of Excite@Home Broadband Network Services, where he improved network reliability and grew the customer base.
After his brief flirtation with Cisco Systems, Eslambolchi began to move up the AT&T management ranks. He became CTO and president of AT&T Labs in September 2001. A year later he was named the company's CIO. And at the beginning of this year he was given the job of running the network. Along with the responsibility of four jobs, he gets a paycheck to match, earning more than $4.2 million a year, making him one of the highest-paid CIOs in the world.
"In my own head, all of the jobs are related, all connected," Eslambolchi says. While there's no such thing as a typical day, he allocates roughly 20% of his time to operations, 25% to the labs, 25% to the CTO job, and the remaining 30% to CIO issues. He receives and answers between 400 and 500 E-mails a day, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to fire off a response. "We sometimes wonder if he ever sleeps," says Robin Bienfait, VP of network operations, network security, and disaster recovery.
A serial inventor, Eslambolchi has more than 300 patents granted or pending. "I get bored easily," he says. "Whenever I get 20 minutes of free time I start sketching out ideas." In conversation, ideas and concepts tumble out of him in a never-ending stream.
"He is a very bright guy who is one of the thought leaders in the industry," says Rob Rich, an executive VP at the Yankee Group research firm. "He's a 24-by-7 kind of guy who operates at 100 miles an hour."
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