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Vivek Sengupta

Sr. Director, Procurement

United States of America

Biography

Vivek joined ICANN in December 2013 as Director of Procurement. He brings with him fifteen years of IT and Procurement experience across various industries such as Technology, Financial Services, Insurance, Manufacturing and Entertainment.

Vivek started his career as a software engineer and progressed through technology project and program management roles. After moving to the procurement realm, he spent a number of years mastering procurement strategic sourcing (RFPs, reverse auctions, etc.) and category management roles, including negotiating with suppliers globally. Vivek also brings extensive experience in creating and implementing global purchasing policies, processes and systems across culturally diverse organizations. He is a fan of the use of six sigma methodologies in non-traditional areas and of using a data driven approach to problem solving and continuous improvement.

Vivek holds a bachelor's degree in Physics from Calcutta University (India), a master's degree in computer applications from Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi (India), and an MBA from Kelley School of Business, Indiana University (USA). Vivek is also a Certified Purchasing Manager (CPM) from the Institute of Supply Chain Management (ISM), and a certified Six Sigma Green Belt.

Domain Name System

Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."