Francois Tallet is a Product Manager in the Data Center Switching Technology Group, responsible for Layer 2 features on the Nexus 7000. He joined Cisco in 1997 as a customer support engineer in the LAN Switching team in Brussels. As a subject matter expert in Layer 2, he later moved to the Catalyst 6000 engineering team in the United States. He was part of the IEEE 802.1 working group, introducing the Layer 2 Gateway Port concept in 802.1ah. He also led the development of the standard implementation of Multiple Spanning Trees protocol (MST, IEEE 802.1s) in IOS and designed a new version of the Vlan Trunk Protocol (VTP3) and the Resilient Ethernet Protocol (REP). Tallet holds CCIE certification 3539, several patents and two master's degrees in parallel computing and computer networking.