Big Switch Networks,
the leading platform-independent Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
vendor, announced that Dan Talayco has been appointed as Chair of the Open Networking Foundation's Technical
Advisory Group (TAG). Dan is a Senior Architect at Big Switch, and was
appointed to the TAG as a member in November of last year. The selection
reinforces Big Switch Networks' technical leadership in SDN, and
underscores the joint commitment between Big Switch Networks, the ONF,
and its member companies to deliver open, standards-based
implementations of SDN and
OpenFlow.
"Dan
Talayco has been a core contributor to OpenFlow since its early
beginnings and was instrumental in the development of the OpenFlow 1.0
standard," said Guido Appenzeller, CEO and co-founder of Big Switch
Networks. "His selection as Chair of TAG is validation of the value he
has provided as a member. We are very proud of Dan and extremely
committed to this important work."
"ONF
is fueled by the talents of its members, and leadership contributions
play an especially important role in the continued growth and adoption
of open standards and SDN," said Dan Pitt, Executive Director of the
Open Networking Foundation. "We are grateful when our member companies
support their employees in ONF's leadership roles."
Dan
leads the Big Switch architecture efforts to help switching partners
design and implement OpenFlow. Prior to joining Big Switch Networks in,
Dan was a Research Engineer working on OpenFlow under ONF Co-founder
Nick McKeown and Clean Slate Lab Head Guido Appenzeller at Stanford
University. For over two decades, Dan has held a wide variety of
positions in both the private sector and educational institutions
including Principal Scientist at Broadcom, Director of Software
Development, at Aprius Inc., Assistant Professor at Boston College,
Franklin and Marshall College and Kalamazoo College. Dan has also served
as vice-chair of the ONF's Hybrid Programmable Forwarding Plane Working
Group. Dan was recognized as the "Unsung SDN Hero" by SDNCentral for
his contributions to advance SDN. He is the author or co-author of a
dozen U.S. patents and has contributed articles to industry
publications. Dan has a B.A., Mathematics, Computer Science from
Kalamazoo College and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from The University of
Michigan.
The
Technical Advisory Group acts in the role of a CTO to
provide high-level guidance on any technical issues faced by the board
and helps define the technical scope of ONF. It is responsible for
identifying and resolving the most challenging issues such as
reconciling the tradeoffs between vendor independence and vendor
differentiation, and between near-term compatibility and future-proof
design.
Rob
Sherwood, CTO of Controller Technologies at Big Switch Networks, also
chairs the ONF's Architecture & Framework Working Group (ArchWG).
The ONF ArchWG will map out the scope of SDN in terms of architecture,
framework, and North Bound API for OpenFlow and other components.