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Ian A. Hood

Senior Architect – Service Provider Business

Cisco Development Organization (CDO)

Ian has held leadership roles in the telecom industry for over 30 years. He spent much of his career in Canada, primarily in systems engineering, design, and product management roles with Motorola, Mitel, and Wellfleet/Bay Networks.

Ian and his family now live in Northern California (in beautiful Sonoma county) and he has worked for a number of start-up telecom companies in the bay area prior to joining Cisco 8 years ago.  Ian is currently responsible for global service provider architecture, leading our SDN/NFV vision and business transformation strategy.

Ian is an active ambassador and speaker for the Broadband, Metro Ethernet, and SDN/NFV industry forums.  Ian is a licensed Professional Engineer in Ontario, and holds an Honours B.A.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo.

Articles

October 12, 2015

SP360: SERVICE PROVIDER

Orchestrated Assurance – Ready for the World

2 min read

Guest blog by Dr. Stefan Vallin, Principle Architect , Cisco and  Mats Nordlund, CTO, Netrounds  Over the recent years, network service orchestration has gained widespread traction from communication service providers (CSPs) all around the world as a means to automate the tedious and error-prone tasks required to configure network devices. What if the orchestrator could […]

What You Can Do In Ten Minutes

2 min read

The pace of change around us is no longer constant. It is continually accelerating. We all want to get and consume information, services, and just about anything instantly. My new coffeemaker brews me a fresh cup in just a couple of minutes, but it usually takes me ten minutes just to collect up the tools […]

Get Yours Now! Cisco’s Virtual Managed Services Solution

1 min read

Lots of excitement and energy continue to surround NFV (Network Function Virtualization), and it is getting even better. During the charged atmosphere at the inaugural NFV Congress in San Jose, we were delighted by more than just technology posturing, including the availability of SDN (Software Defined Networking)/NFV platforms like Cisco’s Virtual Managed Services Solution that […]

September 8, 2014

SP360: SERVICE PROVIDER

The Agile (r)Evolution – Mobile Heads to the Cloud

5 min read

Co-Authored by Ian Hood, Senior Manager, Service Provider Architecture & Dan Kurschner, Senior Manager, Service Provider Mobility Business Challenge:  Everything Goes Mobile The dynamic state of the business of service providers is quite apparent these days, and perhaps this is most evident for the mobility providers as everyone and everything goes mobile.  All of their […]

September 2, 2014

SP360: SERVICE PROVIDER

Operators Accelerating Pace with NFV and SDN

2 min read

Save Money Here and Now When was the last time you won the lottery?  If you are like me, it’s a pretty rare occasion indeed.  The same probability can be applied to increasing the budget allocation for any business and especially for service providers.  What can service providers do to save money now, enabling them […]

Enabling Open, Agile, Application Centric Networks With Cisco Evolved Services Platform

1 min read

Service provider customers expect more.   The pace of change around us is not just constant but continuing to accelerate.   To stay competitive with the nimble new players in the market, service providers need to change how they engage all of their end customers.   Not exactly an easy challenge to overcome, but rapid and successful business […]