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David Ward

Senior Vice President

Chief Architect & CTO of Engineering

As CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect at Cisco Systems, David defines the strategy, design and development of the division's transport and mobility equipment, core, edge and access routers, and operating system. He leads research and development of new technology via tight partnerships with customers and academia and his work is found in multiple standards bodies. He also works closely with packetcom providers on the evolution and architecture of their networks and emerging services.David has a small vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains and an heirloom tomato farm along the St Croix River in Somerset, Wisconsin. He is also a volunteer Fire Captain for the Loma Chiquita Fire Department.

Articles

November 13, 2019

INNOVATION

Techno-Conservation: Converging on a Modular Reference Architecture

18 min read

Techno-Conservation, a new coined term that establishes an intersection between technology and conservation, is also a purpose-led action that strengthen our shared values on how we make a sustainable impact. Cisco's innovation programs, resources and technology aim to combine a multidisciplinary approach in applying technology towards solving the biggest challenges affecting our planet and all its inhabitants, by co-innovating and creating an effective technology that protects our ecosystems and species.

February 6, 2018

SP360: SERVICE PROVIDER

Three Years On: Open Standards, Open Source, Open Loop

16 min read

Eventing, Telemetry, APIs and protocols (in working code) need to be our products. Here is how we need to partner to move these tooling forward.

Lift and Shift Is Necessary but Not Sufficient

14 min read

Originally published in the book: Gray, Ken & Nadeau, Thomas. Network Function Virtualization, 1st Edition. (2016). Morgan Kaufman, also available here. This book by Ken and Tom on NFV is perhaps the first time they’ve laid out both a fantastic review of the vast landscape of technologies related to virtualized networking and woven in a subtle […]

A BIGGER HELPING OF INTERNET PLEASE!

27 min read

Co-written with Maciek Konstantynowicz, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Technology & Architecture Office “Holy Sh*t, that’s fast and feature rich” is the most common response we’ve heard from folks that have looked at some new code made available in OpenSource. A few weeks back, the Linux Foundation launched a Collaborative Project called FD.io (“fido”). One of the […]

November 13, 2014

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

Open Standards, Open Source, Open Loop

10 min read

As the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) meets in Hawaii (IETF 91), the unavoidable question for both participants and observers is whether a Standards Development Organization (SDO) like the IETF is relevant in a rapidly expanding environment of Open Source Software (OSS) projects. For those new to the conversation, the open question is NOT whether […]

February 4, 2014

OPEN AT CISCO

OpenDaylight Unleashes Hydrogen to the Masses

4 min read

The OpenDaylight Project today announced that its first open source software release Hydrogen is now available for download. As the first simultaneous code release cross-community it has contributions across fifty organizations and includes over one million lines of code. Yes. ODL > 1MLOC. For those of you interested that’s approximately two hundred and thirty man-years of […]

April 8, 2013

EXECUTIVE PLATFORM

OpenDaylight: Building an Open Source Community around SDN

3 min read

It’s great to see Cisco and many companies across the industry make a major change in the use of Open Source via the newly form project hosted by the Linux Foundation called OpenDaylight. This consortium is an industry-wide, open and transparent effort to catalyze innovation and accelerate an application ecosystem for software-defined networking. With all […]