Kapali Eswaran is one of the founding members of the IBM System R Project, which formed the genesis of relational database technology.

Eswaran is a graduate of Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. He was an architect of IBM System R, the precursor to DB2. Eswaran was one of the inventors of SQL language.^[1] The Eswaran principle relating to database locking and transactions is a contribution that he made along with Jim Gray and Irv Traiger while working as a scientist at IBM Research. Subsequently, he launched Esvel, Inc. (acquired by Cullinet Software in 1987 for 30+ million, which itself was acquired by Computer Associates which then was acquired by Bradcom) and Kaps Corporation (technology acquired by subsidiary of BP, Hewlett-Packard and by Carlysle Library Systems). He is currently the CEO of Integrated Informatics Inc.

Eswaran pursued his career primarily working as a researcher and software designer IBM Research where he contributed to several major database and transaction processing systems, including the System-R. He was founder and CEO of Esvel, Inc. and Integrated Informatics Inc.. Integrated Informatics was committed to digital transformation of Healthcare.