For people who are talented, energetic and innovative, there is no barrier which stops them from achieving what they want. Not even experience and age could stand a hurdle. And it's mightily proved in case of Sujal Patel, who at the age of 26, founded Isilon Systems, a premier provider of intelligent clustered storage systems for digital content. It was never the lack of experience, which came as a stumbling block to Patel's growth, but instead his enthusiasm compensated it. It's not surprising that prior to founding Isilon, Sujal spent five years at RealNetworks, as chief architect behind the company's second generation core media delivery system, which is still in use today by leading streaming content providers.

At RealNetworks, he also managed the engineering teams for the company's primary infrastructure products. So, what made him start a company like Isilon? While at RealNetworks, Patel noticed that some companies struggled to store large media files and make them available over the Internet. Patel envisioned a new way for companies to store large digital-media files motion pictures, musical albums and high-resolution photos. He then founded Isilon Systems with Paul Mikesell, another leader in RealNetworks' engineering division. They recruited Brett Goodwin, a general manager at RealNetworks, to work on business development. "I saw a tremendous opportunity to solve storage problems," says Patel, now in early thirties.

Companies have developed storage systems for credit-card transactions, medical images and other electronic data, but few are dedicated to media files. Isilon began tinkering with ways to store news clips, movies, music and animations. A few months after Isilon was founded, the Nasdaq stock market crashed, bringing many tech companies down with it. But major infusions of cash put the company on track to last longer than the typical tech startup. Even when the tech economy was spiraling, Isilon's fortunes rose. It received $ 8.4 million in funding in May 2001, when it was only five months old.

A year later, it closed a $15 million funding round led by Silicon Valley-based Sequoia Capital, a major player in the venture-capital business. Patel, who holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park, is also an active member of the open-source software development community, including work as a developer on the FreeBSD operating system. He holds a number of patents and pending patents, including those for the Isilon OneFS distributed file system and for the RealNetworks networks adaptive SureStream technology. Certainly, Patel's innovative thinking has paid him a rich dividend, and in days to come, he would be the tech whiz kid to watch!