Venu Venugopal

Venu Venugopal is Vice President of Engineering for Cisco’s Intent Based Networking Group (IBNG). In his 16 years at Cisco, he has delivered multiple successful business outcomes for customers in the enterprise, data center, and service provider business segments. He has leveraged his experience across these businesses to ensure that customers have access to solutions for their network architectures, and has driven innovation based on BGP/EVPN and Segment Routing technologies. He has led numerous engineering teams at Cisco, including in the Data Center Networking group, where he was responsible for Ethernet and Storage solutions with Nexus and MDS switches. Venu and his teams are four-time winners of the Cisco Pioneer Award, the company’s highest recognition of engineering innovation. Prior to his work at Cisco, Venu led teams at Procket Networks, building scalable routing protocols and MPLS solutions for routers targeted for the Service Provider market. Before that, Venu held leadership roles at 3Com Corporation.  Venu holds a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications from the College of Engineering, Trivandrum, India, and a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  Outside of work, Venu enjoys studying history as well as the worlds of JRR Tolkien, and avidly follows cricket, basketball, and football (both kinds).