Kalpana was a computer networking equipment manufacturer, located in Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...

 during the 1980s and 1990s.

Kalpana is considered to be the inventor of Ethernet switching as the company was the first to introduce the concept of a multi-port network switch

Network switch

A network switch or switching hub is a computer networking device that connects network segments.The term commonly refers to a multi-port network bridge that processes and routes data at the data link layer of the OSI model...

 with its seven-port EtherSwitch in 1990. Kalpana also invented EtherChannel

EtherChannel

EtherChannel is a port link aggregation technology or port-channel architecture used primarily on Cisco switches. It allows grouping of several physical Ethernet links to create one logical Ethernet link for the purpose of providing fault-tolerance and high-speed links between switches, routers and...

, a technology which provides additional inter-switch bandwidth by running several links in parallel. Kalpana was acquired by Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services. Cisco has more than 70,000 employees and annual revenue of US$...

in 1994.

Kalpana had been co-founded by Vinod Bhardwaj, an entrepreneur of Indian origin, and Larry Blair.
They named the company after Bhardwaj's wife, Kalpana, whose name means "imagination" in Hindi.